


Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Tales

by poetikat



Series: The Not-So-Tall Tales of Arthur and Eames [1]
Category: Inception (2010), Mysterious Skin (2005), RocknRolla (2008)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon Gay Characters, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, PTSD, Rape/Non-con References, References to Childhood Sexual Abuse, Work In Progress, former prostitution, frame story, origins story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-05 12:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetikat/pseuds/poetikat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With six days left on the first level before they wake up, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, and Yusuf have little else to do but take potshots at hostile projections and make plans for the future.  When it turns out that Arthur and Eames aren't all that they appear, those six days of shooting and hanging out turn into a lengthy storytelling session...and neither Eames nor Arthur can resist the lure of telling a good story to pass the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Now, First Night

Waiting on the first level, with Cobb and Saito’s bodies stashed discreetly out of sight on a mattress in the far corner of the half-finished apartment building, and Fischer off exploring a different part of their fake Los Angeles after they let him go, was an exercise in staving off boredom. On the first day, after they’d hauled themselves out of the river and made their way to the nearest abandoned and decently fortifiable building (which, thanks to Ariadne’s eye for detail, happened to be an apartment complex), Arthur created the necessities for surviving a week in hostile territory with what Eames would call typical Arthur flair – expensive, but not showy. Against one wall he manifested a sleek stainless steel refrigerator, a black granite countertop, a slick black oven and induction stove with a matching microwave, and a deep steel sink. Against another wall a long, heavy wooden table with four matching chairs appeared, their dark finish made darker by age. Eames watched this all with dark eyes and sidled up to him to murmur into his ear, too low for Yusuf or Ariadne to hear.

“Missing London already, Arthur?”

“What already? It’s been over two years. When two years go by without seeing your own home, already goes out the window.” Arthur cut a quick glance at Eames and looked away before he could see how exhausted he was. “I would really, really appreciate some help with the bathroom and the beds.”

“Whatever you need,” Eames said. “Anything at all.” He squeezed Arthur’s shoulder briefly and went to do as he was asked, leaving Arthur standing in front of the refrigerator thinking up things to fill it with.

The bathroom ended up looking just like the one in the Barcelona safe house. Eames’ bed came straight from the Hong Kong safe house. Arthur’s was pulled directly out of the San Francisco apartment, which was fitting, since he’d stocked the refrigerator with all his and Eames’ favorites from the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market. He knew that the bed from the San Francisco apartment was his, rather than the duplicate of the Hong Kong bed, because the San Francisco bed had a much firmer mattress than the other (something that Eames complained about, loudly, vigorously, and without fail, whenever he found himself staying in San Francisco for any length of time).

“If you two don’t have any strong opinions about your beds, I’m going to dream up a pair of four-posters with fluffy pink bedding and princess canopies for you,” Eames said to Ariadne and Yusuf.

“That’s just mean,” Ariadne said with an exaggerated gasp. She wandered over to the area of the empty loft floor that Eames had designated as the communal bedroom and cocked her head at the empty patch of cement floor in front of her. A simple double bed with a wrought iron frame materialized in front of her. She hesitated for a moment, then brought two tall rice paper privacy screens into being on either side of the bed, giving her temporary sleep station a veneer of modesty. Understandable. For all her natural talent, she was still so very young, and terribly new to dreamsharing. Another few jobs, if she stuck with it, and any such modesty would soon be long forgotten.

The irony didn’t escape Arthur that he considered a twenty-two year old, someone barely seven years his junior, so young.

After all, this was the nature of dreamshare. If you weren’t spending the equivalent of weeks of your waking life wired into the PASIV any given year, chances were you were either unemployed or not doing your job right. And that much time spent under aged a person – not where anyone could see, but on the inside, so that some mornings seasoned practitioners like Arthur and Eames woke up surprised that they weren’t aging, beat-up, gruesomely scarred wrecks.

It was almost a shame that Ariadne had taken to the role of dream architect so well. Sure, she’d probably finish her degree, but building in reality had nothing on building in dreams, and Ariadne knew that now. Still, Arthur wasn’t going to be the one to tell her about the downsides of choosing a life in their crazy, impossible, terrifying, beautiful, unbelievably illegal field of work. He and Eames had learned all the good and the bad on their own, and if their pint-sized architect wanted to capitalize on the name she’d make for herself with this job, then she’d figure it out on her own, as well. And when she did learn the downsides – she had his number.

Yusuf’s contribution to the collection of beds was the plainest of the lot, a low, solid wood affair with a dark futon mattress and a squashy comforter spread out on top. He gave a nod of satisfaction and went to the table to join Arthur, who was methodically laying out all their firearms in front of him, Eames, who was gazing up at the ceiling and periodically adding a new light fixture, and Ariadne, who was watching Arthur with a combination of fascination and worry.

“Can either of you shoot?” Arthur asked abruptly.

“Not terribly well,” Yusuf admitted. “There isn’t much call for gun-wielding chemists in the industry.”

Ariadne just shook her head.

“Congratulations,” Arthur said. “You’re both signed up for a crash course in safety, maintenance, and shooting. I’ll take the first two, and Eames will show you the shooting part.” He gave their arms and hands a critical once-over and said to Eames, “Start them on something like Cobb’s Beretta or your Browning. I don’t think they have the hand strength for mine.”

Eames scoffed. “As if I’d inflict your sorry excuse for a handgun on Yusuf or our dear Ariadne.”

“Militaries and law enforcement agencies all over the world would take exception to that insult,” Arthur said.

“Fuck your Military Intelligence, and your bloody Glock 19, up the arse with a big bristly pinecone, Arthur,” Eames said cheerfully.

“He’s just mad because I always win at thumb war,” Arthur said to Ariadne with a straight face. “All those muscles and he still can’t double-tap someone with a Glock. Makes you wonder what the British are teaching their boys in the SAS, doesn’t it?”

Ariadne glanced between the two of them with something akin to horrified amusement. “You guys know we’re stuck here for another six days, right?” she asked. “Please, _please_ don’t antagonize each other to the point of killing each other. You’re the only ones who can hold off Fischer’s projections.”

Eames threw his head back and laughed. “Don’t worry yourself, Ariadne. Killing Arthur isn’t anywhere on my to-do list.”

“Likewise,” Arthur said dryly. “We might not be actively messing with Fischer anymore, but his subconscious still knows we’re here, and his projections are armed and angry. It’s all hands on deck until the time runs out on the PASIV.”

“That’s it?” Eames asked, holding a hand to his chest with a comically wounded expression. “I’m just cannon fodder? An extra gun hand? And here I thought we had something special.”

“And I’d miss you,” Arthur said flatly. “Oh, how I’d miss you. I’d pine. I’d wither away and die of a broken heart. All the light would go out of my life. I don’t know how I’d go on.”

“Then I will endeavor to stay in one piece, just for you,” Eames said, chortling.

“You’re such an ass,” Arthur said. He couldn’t suppress the note of fondness that inevitably crept into his voice when it was just the two of them playing off each other, though, and at Ariadne’s quizzical look, he cleared his throat and stood. “Help them pick out a weapon that suits them, will you? I’m going to hit the head. Oh, and tell them the bathroom rule so we can avoid any unpleasant surprises.”

“What’s the bathroom rule?” he heard Ariadne ask curiously as he strode across the loft. He closed the door behind him before he could hear Eames’ answer. He already knew what he’d say, anyway. It would be nearly verbatim the same thing Arthur had told Eames seven years ago.

_“I like you, so I’m gonna tell you instead of letting you find out the hard way. When I’m in the bathroom, don’t come in. Ever. It’ll just end in blood and tears and a nasty scar to mark the occasion.”_

_“Who’s getting all bloodied and scarred up, then?”_

_“You.”_

Arthur splashed cool water on his face and looked at himself in the cloudy antique mirror above the sink. Six more days. Six days until the timer ran out and they began their descent into the real Los Angeles. Six days trapped in a hostile environment with an overly inquisitive, albeit thoroughly likeable, rookie, a genial chemist who bordered on mad scientist territory, and Eames. There was plenty worse company to be had if a person had to be confined to a single building, but with Ariadne Paitakes, unofficial sniffer-outer of secrets, on the job, he doubted that his and Eames’ carefully maintained years-long charade would survive the week.

That might actually be for the best. They were with the right sort of people, they just pulled off the right sort of job, and maybe – just maybe – they’d be able to finally do what they’d been talking about doing since that massive clusterfuck in Munich back in 2006.

“They’ll want in,” he told his reflection. His reflection didn’t look convinced. “They’ll want in.”

He returned to the table to find Eames adjusting Ariadne’s grip on a smaller make of the model of Beretta that Dom favored, while Yusuf examined his Browning Hi-Power from every angle as if it were a particularly interesting laboratory experiment.

“Lesson one,” he said, taking his seat without fanfare. “Know your gun. We’ll start by identifying all its parts while it’s assembled, then move on to field-stripping it, cleaning it, and putting it back together.”

“And in the meantime, I’ll make dinner,” Eames said over Ariadne’s groan and Yusuf’s sigh. “Arthur, did you –”

“Ferry Market.”

“Bless you, darling. Spaghetti alla caprese it is, then. And –”

“There’s a bottle of Soave chilling in the refrigerator door.”

“God, I’ve missed working with you.”

“You’ve missed my alcohol.”

“Among other things.”

Arthur shook his head, hiding a smile, and turned back to his reluctant pupils. “Alright, pay attention. This here’s the muzzle. Never, ever aim it at anything you don’t intend to blow a hole in. That’s the big one. Next, there’s the front sight. Got that? Then we have the slide and the slide stop. Here at the back are the rear sight and the hammer.”

He talked steadily – patiently, even, despite his natural inclination towards frustration and snappishness when people didn’t pick up what he was teaching them as fast as he liked – for the better part of an hour, going over the basics until Yusuf and Ariadne were both rattling them off with ease, and walked them through field stripping both weapons and reassembling them without any hiccups.

“Dinner is served,” Eames said to everyone’s relief, and the guns were shoved to the far side of the table to make room for the plates.

Arthur surreptitiously signed to Eames, using code he was rusty with but still understood as well as he did the languages most common to the dreamshare community, _“When they’re asleep, we need to talk.”_

Eames raised an eyebrow. _“About what?”_

_“The plan.”_

_“The plan. Yes. We’ll talk tonight.”_

* * *

Much later, when the only sounds in the loft were those of the soft, even breaths of Yusuf and Ariadne, deep in sleep, and the only light came in thin strips from the bustling city looming outside the blackout curtains, Eames leaned across the narrow space between his bed and Arthur’s and gave his shoulder a nudge.

Arthur sat up slowly, blinking at Eames’ dark silhouette. He paused, listening carefully for changes in Ariadne and Yusuf’s breathing patterns, then threw back the covers and padded silently over to the table, Eames following in his wake like a second shadow.

“You think they’re the right people for it?” Eames asked in a hushed voice once they’d taken seats.

“No one ever leans on a chemist for information,” Arthur said. “It’s a surefire way to make sure you never wake up from your next job.”

“And our sweet little Ariadne?”

Arthur shrugged. “There’s no way in hell she’ll ever want to work with Cobb again, but you, me, and Yusuf? She’d definitely go for it. We were her first team, and as long as your first team doesn’t screw you over, you can’t buy that kind of loyalty. I wouldn’t turn on Yasmin or Pavel, would you?”

“Not a chance,” Eames said. “The last thing I’d do is grass on the people who gave us our first job in dreamshare working with a proper team.”

“Careful,” Arthur said. “Your roots are showing.”

“’S not like anyone’s listening but you,” Eames said.

Arthur reflexively glanced over at the sleeping area. “True. Anyway, this is supposed to be Cobb’s last job, if it works out. He says he’s going to retire.”

“Like hell he’s retiring,” Eames said, laughing quietly.

“Yeah, I give it six months before he gets the itch and starts taking jobs again,” Arthur said. “But that’s enough time for us to build a reputation as a solid team without him in the picture.”

“Done tagging along after he-who-is-fucked-in-the-head, then?” Eames asked.

“He might be that, but he’s Mal’s, or he was, and I owed it to her memory to make sure he didn’t go completely off the rails,” Arthur said. “And yes, I’m done babysitting him. He pulled some sketchy moves on this job, and friend or not, I can’t work with an extractor I can’t trust. Not to mention, that mess with Fischer’s subconscious –”

“He had no call putting that on you,” Eames said. “I know how you work.”

“Damn right,” Arthur said. “I always check to see if the mark is militarized. _Always_. Fischer Enterprises buried that information so deep, so fast, that there was no way I could have found it without being ridiculously lucky or damn near omniscient. I’m one of the best point men in the business, and if I couldn’t find it, then I’d like to see someone else try it and get a different result.”

“Not ‘one of’,” Eames said. “‘ _The_ best’.”

“A compliment?” Arthur asked, laughing under his breath. “You’d better hope they’re really sleeping, or you’ll give them a heart attack.”

“Fair’s fair,” Eames said. “I have to make up for being a pain in the arse when we were on the job in Paris somehow, don’t I?”

“No more than I do. We agreed how this would go four years ago, and we’ve had plenty of practice at pushing each other’s buttons since then,” Arthur said. “But honestly, Eames, even if they say no, I’m done working without you. You can go back to extracting, I’ll still run point, we’ll share architecture work –”

“And we take our chances with whatever chemist happens to be in the area we’re pulling a job?” Eames asked. “I’d prefer it if we talked Yusuf and Ariadne around. We do have another six days, after all.”

“That we do.”

“We’re really doing this, aren’t we?” Eames said. His grin was a slash of light across his teeth from a brightly lit building outside the window, there and gone again.

Arthur grinned back. “For sure.”

“Now look who’s showing their roots,” Eames teased. “Anyway, it’s about bloody time we put together a permanent team.”

“We’ve come a long way from Munich,” Arthur said. “It doesn’t matter how powerful our clients or our marks are. If we’re working together, they’ll know they have two options. Leave us alone, or…”

“Or take us both out in one go, because there’s no way either of us would let that sort of thing go unanswered,” Eames finished. “You know, darling, when I called you a robotic humorless bastard who was little better than a giant brain attached to a trigger on the Sao Paulo job, I didn’t actually intend for you to turn that into your reputation.”

“It worked, though,” Arthur said. “Cobol’s the first company that’s actively gone after me in years. And that – well, that was just a mess from start to finish. Fucking Nash.”

“May he rest in peace,” Eames said. The stripe of light crossing his face revealed the smile he wasn’t trying terribly hard to suppress.

“Yes,” Arthur said. “Fucking Nash, may he rest in peace. When we get to London after we drop Dom in L.A., we’ll have to go out to a pub and drink to all the incompetent and sub-par architects, chemists, extractors, and point men we’ve ever worked with over the years.”

“We’re going to end up getting completely pissed if we drink to all of them,” Eames said.

Arthur shrugged. “We can round up the boys and delegate some of the drinking to them. You know, after they give me hell for not coming around for the last two years.”

“Why didn’t you?” Eames asked.

“Dom was coming apart at the seams,” Arthur said. “I wasn’t taking him anywhere near any place I call home, especially London. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“You know Dom. Even at his best, he’s driven. He’s not at his best now. He’s wandering around with this fucked up version of Mal in his head, and all he can think of is pulling one more job that will get him back home to his kids. And when that job doesn’t get him the means to clear his name and return to the States, it’s one _more_ job. So he’s been driven, but he’s also been spectacularly fucking selfish, and I wasn’t going to take the chance that he would trade his knowledge about me to get some kind of deal with the authorities back in the US, even if we have been friends for years. It was easier to just stick to hotels and not give him any new information.”

“You don’t trust anyone in the business anymore, do you?” Eames murmured.

“We both know that’s not true,” Arthur said, quirking a smile at Eames. “There’s Yasmin and Pavel. And I’m pretty sure Ariadne and Yusuf can be trusted. I trust Mal’s dad.”

Eames cleared his throat, and Arthur laughed quietly.

“And you. Of course I trust you. I trust you most of all. You know that.”

“Of course I know that, but after four years of the two of us doing such a bang-up job convincing everyone else we couldn’t stand each other, it’s nice to hear it said.”

“Well, we finally have the money and the reputations to pick our jobs and set our own prices without the clients trying to haggle us down, so we can go back to picking apart our plans and putting them together until they’re perfect again without hiding it behind insults,” Arthur said. “I got you a ticket next to me on the flight out of LAX to Heathrow. We’re gonna go home, see the guys, shoot the shit, lend a hand if they have some work they’re doing, get reacquainted with the flat –”

“Stay in bed all day,” Eames interjected.

“Keep you in my bed all day,” Arthur continued smoothly, his voice dropping into a lower, almost growling register, “Finally have sex in our own damn home, where we can take our time about it, and I can get you out of your ridiculous ‘old money expat’ clothes and make a mess of you, just fuck you stupid until you can’t even remember your own alias –”

From the darkened corner of the loft where the beds lay, a polite cough drifted toward their ears.

“I’m not saying that this isn’t interesting to listen to,” Yusuf said mildly, “But it’s getting a bit too racy for my taste.”

“Oh, hell,” Eames said as Arthur, torn between embarrassment and amusement, chose amusement and started laughing as quietly as possible. “I don’t suppose you’re awake as well, Ariadne.”

“No, I’m sleeping,” Ariadne said, sounding wide awake and almost perky. “Shh. You’re interrupting my REM cycle. I’m having this weird dream that Arthur and Eames are actually friends. Or something. Friends who get naked together. And they’re going to pitch the idea of a permanent team to me and Yusuf in the morning. It’s a good dream. But like I said, weird.”

“That’s a no on Ariadne being asleep,” Eames sighed. “Alright, you two. Come over here, sharpish. No point in dropping eaves now that we know you’re awake.”

Arthur looked them over as they left the warmth of their beds and joined him and Eames at the table. Yusuf had lost his jacket and belt along with his shoes somewhere between dinner and crawling into bed, leaving him looking like even more of a disheveled and absentminded professor than usual. Ariadne had traded her clothes for an oversized Milwaukee Brewers baseball jersey, jogging shorts, and a haphazard ponytail. The overall effect took a good five years off her age. Arthur wondered how young he appeared to them. On top of being lean and wiry, he had one of 'those faces', and he was acutely aware of it. Barefoot, in gray flannel pajama bottoms and an old Led Zeppelin concert t-shirt, his hair falling in his eyes and around his face, he probably looked closer to Ariadne’s actual age than someone closing in on thirty had any right to.

“Wow,” Ariadne said, slipping into the seat across from him. “All hail the anti-Arthur. I thought the most rumpled you ever got was rolling your sleeves up and undoing your top button.”

“Ironing work clothes would be an all-day chore if I slept in them, too,” Arthur said. Ariadne giggled.

“Fair point. Okay. So you two don’t actually dislike each other?”

“Not in the slightest,” Eames said. “We came up in dreamshare together. We spent the first two years only ever taking jobs that offered us both work.”

“Your falling out in Sao Paulo was legendary,” Yusuf ventured. “You mean to say –”

“We staged the whole thing,” Arthur said. “People figured out pretty quickly that where one of us was, the other wasn’t far behind, and after that train wreck of a job in Munich back in Oh Six, I got nabbed by our mark’s real world security after our architect sold us out. I was leverage to get Eames to show, since he was extractor on that job. After we took care of that mess, we thought it’d be smart to put it about that we couldn’t stand each other after what happened so we couldn’t be used against each other again.”

“It was convincing,” Yusuf said. “Everyone bought it. Good Lord, though. You’ve kept this up for four years? How can you stand it?”

“We get by,” Eames said. The strain coloring his voice told everyone present exactly how well they managed to get by.

“That sucks,” Ariadne said, patting Eames’ hand sympathetically. “That really sucks. Especially since you guys are, um –”

“Bent?” Eames suggested.

“Queer?” Arthur added.

“Poofs?”

“Gay as fucking daisies?”

Ariadne cracked up again. “Yeah, all that, but I was kind of going for ‘together’, guys.”

“Ah, well, we’re that, too,” Eames said. “Seven years and counting.”

“And you want to turn us into a regular team,” Yusuf said. “Take the guesswork and potential for backstabbing out of the equation with a group that knows each other and always works together.”

“You can’t deny that that’s every dreamshare specialist’s secret ambition, unless they’re the sort that makes their way through life being the backstabbers,” Eames said. “Admit it, mate. You were happier on this job than you were in the basement of your dream den watching over the Lotus Eaters. You need a good challenge, and a change of scenery.”

Yusuf tilted his head in acknowledgement. “That’s not to mention your desire for reliable compounds. And Ariadne –”

“I can build paradoxes in dreams,” Ariadne interrupted. “More to the point, I can build things now. If I stuck to real world architecture, I’d be in my fifties before I had free reign over an architecture project the way I did on this job. I can’t go back to university and pretend this never happened. This is my life now, for better or worse.”

“Is that a yes?” Arthur asked.

“It’s a provisional yes on my part,” Yusuf said. “I have a sneaking suspicion that you know much more about us than we know about the two of you. Care to share with the class?”

“Yusuf Usmani, thirty-seven years old, doctorate in chemistry, married to Malika Usmani, thirty-four, no children, non-practicing Muslims originally from Pakistan,” Arthur rattled off. “Ariadne Paitakes, twenty-two, deceased mother and estranged father, no siblings, born in Wisconsin, moved to San Francisco at age eighteen to attend San Francisco State.” He grinned at their wide-eyed looks of surprise. “I always research new colleagues.”

“Understandable, in our line of work,” Yusuf said. He turned to Eames and asked, “How are you as an extractor?”

“That’s what I usually do,” Eames said. “There’s no great demand for forgers unless the job particularly calls for it. I won’t mess about with false modesty; I’m a very good extractor, and a damn sight more mentally stable than Cobb.”

“I’m leaning toward yes,” Ariadne said. “Fair’s fair, though. If you know all that about us, it’s only right for you to tell us about the real Arthur and Eames.”

“I can agree to that,” Arthur said. “Where do you want us to start?”

“At the beginning,” Ariadne said. “And don’t skip anything.”

“Oh, love, you’re in for a long story, then,” Eames said. “In the beginning, there were no such people named Eames and Arthur. There were just a very bored British getaway driver and a very versatile American petty criminal living in London under a forged work visa.”

Arthur smiled. “And this is how we met.”


	2. Then, A Chance Meeting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for chapter specific trigger warnings:
> 
> This chapter opens with a rather violent, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, gay bashing. It ends quickly and things start to look up rather fast, but still. It's there.

Most days as of late Bob was bored beyond belief. He had more money than he knew what to do with, Lenny Cole had been disposed of, Archy was less of a lurking slimy menace than usual…and the chaps, his best fucking friends in the world, were perfectly happy to sit back and keep going on as if everything was normal. Still pulling the same petty jobs, still playing a hand or two in the Speeler, still living the same small lives they’d lived before they’d got mixed up with the Chechens and Lenny and One Two’s little scary accountant.

The sameness of it all choked him sometimes. Ambition was a personal failing of his, egged on by a mum who insisted that “At least one person in this family ought to make something of themselves, for God’s sake.” He thought he’d finally left it behind in law school when he’d dropped out and returned to his stomping grounds, trading study and dusty old books for a new and interesting group of friends looking for a wheel man. But here it was again, that persistent bugger. No, he didn’t want to get out and go legit. He wanted to go bigger and bolder, try his hand at things no one had ever the audacity to do. Much to his misfortune, it seemed that he was the only one of the Wild Bunch who did. Yeah, he was bored.

Right now, though, he wasn’t bored. He was drunk. And – he held an arm up over his head protectively and swung out with his free fist as blood oozed slowly down his forehead – possibly concussed, too. 

“Which one of you bastards bottled me?” he demanded muzzily of the three hulking goons who’d cornered him in the alley down from the club he’d gone to by himself – always by himself when he was on the pull these days, now that One Two knew about him and no one felt the need to cover for him and his personal preferences anymore. Deep, sniggering laughter was the only answer he got, punctuated by a hard punch to his stomach.

Bob choked back the urge to vomit and lashed out wildly again and again with varying results. Being drunk and concussed, he concluded, was no way to conduct a three against one fight when he was the one in the equation and the other three were bigger and broader than either Mumbles or One Two.

 _‘Fuck me,’_ he realized, _‘These wankers are going to fucking kill me.’_ A moment of panic immediately followed, and he threw himself into the fight wholeheartedly, punching, kicking, ripping, biting, anything.

 _‘I haven’t even left the UK yet!’_ he thought as he tried unsuccessfully to throttle the biggest of the three. _‘I haven’t even broken a law outside the UK! I can’t die now!’_

He’d almost resigned himself to just taking his licks and protecting the soft spots, sliding down the alley wall with his back to it, one arm over his head and the other across his sore stomach muscles, when he saw, or thought he saw, a skinny teenager in worn jeans and an old gray hoodie slip down the alley toward the sound of the one-sided fight. Through the blood dripping down in his eyes, he watched the skinny kid size up the situation, tip him a wink, and stealthily move behind the closest of the three goons, where –

Where the stupid sodding kid lifted the bastard’s wallet, emptied it of its cash, and took a photo of a couple of cards with his mobile before replacing it just as carefully and moving on to the next gorilla.

Bob averted his eyes quickly. Whatever the kid’s motives were, he didn’t want to be responsible for getting another person beat to hell because he couldn’t take his eyes off the newcomer’s antics.

Maybe it was forever, or maybe it was just a matter of a few seconds, but the kid finally spoke up. “Hey, Fucktard.” The biggest of the trio, the one Bob had tried and failed to choke, whipped around, shocked at the sound of an interloper.

In the moment that followed, Bob realized three things. One, the ‘kid’ was probably in his early twenties, rather than his teens, like Bob had originally guessed, if his deep voice was anything to go by. Two, he was American – not like any he’d seen on the telly, with his soft, almost mumbled vowels and bit-off consonants, but still definitely American. And three – Bob winced as this skinny, unprepossessing looking American took out ‘Fucktard’ with a few savage, precisely placed blows – there was definitely more than what met the eye when it came to him.

“Shithead,” the American said politely to one of the two still standing. “Asswipe.” He offered them both a razorblade sharp smile. “Here are your options. Get Fucktard outta here now and we pretend this never happened, or stick around and find out if I have more up my sleeve besides a fucking awesome right hook and a good grasp of human anatomy. See, I’m pretty damn handy with a knife, and back home I have a gun permit. The question you might wanna ask yourselves is this: is this nosy prick crazy enough to break the law and carry a gun in a country where he’s not legally allowed to own one?”

The two still standing exchanged glances, and then Shithead – or maybe Asswipe; Bob was fuzzy on their names – took a threatening step forward. The American whipped a folding knife out of his jeans pocket and flipped it open, his razorblade smile taking on a distinctly shark-like aspect as he did. “Just try me, motherfuckers.”

Shithead-or-Asswipe backed off in a hurry, and he and Asswipe-or-Shithead slung their friend’s arms around their shoulders and helped him stagger out of the alley and down the street, shooting poisonous glares over their shoulders as they went.

“I was doin’ just fine on my own, mate,” Bob said once the two of them were alone.

“Yeah, I figured,” the American said. He fished out his cell phone again and shined its bright screen in Bob’s eyes. “Okay. Looks like you’ve got a pretty minor concussion. Not a big deal. I’ve had one before. We’ll just get some painkillers in you and make sure you get some sleep.”

“I’d already worked out the concussion bit when one of those bastards bottled me,” Bob said, wincing and turning his face away from the light.

“Bottled?” the American echoed.

“Bottle, verb, to crack someone over the head with a bottle,” Bob said. “Ow! You fucking sadist! What was that for?”

“Checking for deep tissue damage,” the American said calmly as he examined Bob’s torso, his shirt rucked up to his armpits, with lit cell phone and long, softly probing fingers. “Your ribs are okay. Bruised, but no fractures or breaks. They missed your kidneys, so that’s a plus. Guess they were counting on strength being worth more than skill. Dumbasses. Got anything to clean up that cut on your head?”

“I, uh – yeah.” Bob shifted, wincing, and dug his dark blue handkerchief out of his back left pocket. “Here.”

The American smirked. “You’re gonna need a new way to advertise your bedroom preferences after we get that blood mopped up. Head wounds bleed like crazy.” Despite the laid-back teasing, Bob’s unlikely savior’s hands were gentle as they dabbed at the cut and carefully wiped away the blood on his forehead and in his short hair. When he was deemed clean enough to leave the alley, the American got to his feet and extended a hand down to Bob.

“Can you stand?”

“I can stand,” Bob confirmed, taking the American’s hand and allowing him to pull him to his feet. The wiry strength hidden by the thin build was a surprise; Bob hardly needed to exert any energy as he was hauled upright and immediately steadied as he began swaying in place. “But I, ah, I’m still pretty drunk. I don’t think I can drive home.”

“Well, if you’re willing to trust me a little longer, you can come back to my place and crash on the couch for the night,” the American said. “I don’t live too far from here. I was actually walking home when I heard the bashing-in-progress in the alley.”

Bob didn’t have to think about it for more than a few seconds. He didn’t know the chap, didn’t even know his name, but for being a perfect stranger he inspired a surprising amount of trust. Not a whole lot of people would come toward the sound of a beating rather than turn tail and walk away, let alone throw in their lot with the poof being bashed outside a gay club. Then he’d stuck around to see that he was alright, made a joke about something no straight man would’ve caught, and offered to open his home to a bruised, drunk, and concussed stranger for no real good reason other than that the man he’d pulled out of a spot of trouble was too pissed to drive to his own flat….

“Yeah,” Bob said. “Ta, mate. Much appreciated.”

His answer earned him a real smile, complete with dimples, and Bob was once again thrown by how young his new acquaintance looked. “Good. We can put some ice on those bruises when we get there, too. Come on.”

They hobbled out of the alley and onto the street – well, Bob hobbled, and the American dutifully played the part of his cane until Bob was steady enough to shuffle along unassisted. As they walked, Bob snuck sidelong glances at the American, mentally revising his estimation of his age again, back to his early twenties from his teens after he’d lowered it at his smile. The man’s walk, if you could call it a walk rather than a saunter, managed to be both a come-on and a blatant fuck-you at the same time. His face, which had been open and expressive back in the alley when it was just the two of them, was hard and closed off, his blue eyes darting everywhere as he fingered the knife in his jeans pocket. His eyes were incongruously old, not at all what Bob would expect in a face that young, with dark curls falling forward into his eyes and around his ears.

 _‘Old soul.’_ That’s what his mum would call the American if she saw him now. She had plenty of theories about what made young people turn so old inside so fast. None of them were pleasant.

“How’d you learn to fight like that?” Bob asked to distract himself after they passed a few blocks in silence.

The American raised an eyebrow in surprise and relaxed marginally. “Three years of Krav Maga back home,” he said. “I had something one of the instructors wanted, and I couldn’t afford lessons, so instead of paying me in cash, he covered my class fees. One of my more worthwhile business transactions. Oh, speaking of cash.”

He pulled a thick wad of notes out of his pocket and quickly divided it into two piles. “Here,” he said, handing half to Bob. “Consider it hazard pay for distracting Fucktard, Shithead, and Asswipe for me. Or the start of a decent revenge, if you don’t like the sound of that.”

“The start of?” Bob asked, shoving the money deep in his front pocket. “What did you have in mind to do next?”

The American woke his mobile again and opened up the photo folder. He held it up so Bob could see the first picture: Fucktard’s ID and credit card. “I figured step two would be ruining their credit scores. After that, I’ll take requests.”

Bob was startled into laughter and immediately regretted it as his head started pounding and his bruised ribs and stomach protested the motion. “Ow. Ha. You know, I don’t even know your name, but I think you and I are going to be great friends.”

The American flashed him that genuine, bright smile again, and said, holding out his hand, “Neil McCormick. Nice to meet you.”

Bob shook his hand firmly, returning the smile. “Robert Sullivan. Call me Bob. Everyone does. And it’s very nice to meet you indeed.”

* * *

Neil let Bob into his flat with a steadying hand on his back as he flipped the light switch on and steered him to the couch in the living room. “Make yourself at home,” he said as Bob took a bleary look around the flat. “I’ll go get you an ice pack and some pain pills.”

“Mmf. Thanks,” Bob mumbled as Neil disappeared around the corner. He stretched out on the long, low couch and examined the walls and the items on the coffee table. Up on the wall directly across from him was a framed Magritte print. He twisted his head, ignoring the spike of pain that shot through it at the movement, and spotted an M.C. Escher print by the front door as well. _‘Mm. How curious.’_ The table was piled high and groaning under books on architecture, both textbooks and glossy coffee table books, several hefty volumes on travel that at first glance seemed heavy on photographs and light on words, one tattered and lonely – and vaguely disturbing – firearms field manual from the United States Army, and a high quality laptop. _‘Very, very curious.’_

“Here,” Neil said as he returned, holding out a glass of water and two pills, the ice pack tucked in the crook of his elbow. “Get these down and put the pack on your ribs.”

Bob levered himself up onto his elbows and obediently took the pills and water from him, downing them quickly so that he could collapse flat on his back again. He didn’t protest as Neil moved his arm out of the way with brisk, unnervingly gentle efficiency and molded the gel ice pack to his ribs before putting his arm back down to anchor it in place.

The ceiling spun lazily above him, and he closed his eyes. “Done this a lot, have you?”

“I had a friend who used to get bullied in high school until I taught them otherwise,” Neil said after a pause. “It got physical a couple times.”

“And your classmates never bullied you?”

“Hell, no,” Neil laughed. “I was an angry little shit with a hair-trigger temper. I might’ve been a bully myself if life hadn’t shaken out the way it did.”

“I don’t know about that, but I’m fairly sure you convinced Fucktard, Shithead, and Asswipe that you’re still an angry little shit,” Bob said. Neil laughed again. “Your friend. What’s his name?”

“Eric,” Neil said.

“Why’d you have to keep him from being bullied?”

“Do you always get curious about other people’s lives when you’re lying around all busted up on someone else’s couch?” Neil asked. He sounded amused.

“‘S keeping me awake. I’m not supposed to sleep with a concussion, right?”

“It’s just a little concussion, and it didn’t do me any harm when I did it,” Neil said. “But okay. Eric. Uh, we were pretty much the only two gay kids in high school. I was meaner ‘n a junkyard dog, and people left me the hell alone. But Eric was too fucking nice for his own good. And he wore makeup and dyed his hair funky colors as some kind of artistic self-expression bullshit. We ended up being friends by default after he figured out that sticking with me made people lay off him, and he was a pretty decent friend, too, so it wasn’t like it was some huge sacrifice on my part.”

“I like you,” Bob said. “But I get the feeling you’re kind of an asshole.”

“Heard that before,” Neil replied. “And I’m not an asshole. I’m like an asshole in recovery. I’m twelve-stepping it.”

From behind his closed eyelids, Bob could see the bright glow of the laptop screen as Neil turned it on. Seconds later, the tapping of keys filled the air. “Hm. So you’re really gonna do in their credit scores?”

“You’re damn right I am.”

“You’re either a thief with a lot of weird skills and interests or you’re something I haven’t figured out yet, and you like to pick pockets for a hobby,” Bob speculated. It was only when the tapping keys slowed, then stopped, that he realized he’d spoken aloud. “Just idle speculation, mate. I’m not one to judge. I’m a thief myself – getaway driver, mostly, when we pull multiple person jobs, but I can pinch a car as easy as I can lift a wallet.”

The typing resumed. “I’m a thief at the moment, since it keeps my rent and bills paid and my fridge full, and the longer I stay in London, the better chance I’ll have at pulling off my other goal. If I could just focus on the con, that would be fucking fantastic, but a guy’s gotta eat, you know?”

“A thief and a conman,” Bob tried out. “With a lot of weird skills and interests.”

“You meet the darndest people in New York City,” Neil said blandly. "It's a great place to learn new things."

“Thief, now, thief I can see. I did see it. But you, a conman? I’m sorry, but that one might need to be seen to be believed. You look like a bloody teenager.”

“You wouldn’t believe how useful that can be sometimes,” Neil said. “And I’m twenty-two.”

“That’s nice,” Bob said. “I’m twenty-seven. My birthday’s next month.”

“What do you want for your birthday?”

“Something I’ve never done before,” Bob said wistfully. “You know? When Asswipe, Shithead, and Fucktard were pounding on me, I thought, I’m gonna die, and I haven’t even broken a law outside the UK yet. Now that’s a real tragedy.”

“One brand new experience,” Neil said. “Got it. I can make that happen.”

“I’m glad you’re saving it for my birthday. Too many surprises in one night and I’ll start thinking you’re not real,” Bob said.

A fingertip poked his unbruised cheek and withdrew. “I’m real. I’m also hungry. Are you hungry? I can make two sandwiches if you want one.”

“Nah, I’m fine. Just tell me how to get to the toilet so I don’t knock all your stuff over in the dark trying to find it later while you’re sleeping.”

“There’s a little hall off the living room. Take a left instead of a right, and the door on the left hand side just before you get to the bedroom is the bathroom. And, uh. There’s a thing. That I should tell you.”

Bob cracked an eyelid open and looked up at Neil, who was standing at the mouth of the hall with his hands jammed in his pockets. “Yeah?”

“I’ve got some unresolved issues. Up here.” He pointed to the side of his head with a humorless little smirk. “Massive ones. Normally I’d just keep quiet, but I like you, so I’m gonna tell you instead of letting you find out the hard way. When I’m in the bathroom, don’t come in. Ever. It’ll just end in blood and tears and a nasty scar to mark the occasion.”

This merited opening his other eye as well. “Who’s getting all bloodied and scarred up, then?”

“You.” With that flat, one word delivery, Neil slipped away down the right side of the hall, presumably toward the kitchen to make his sandwich.

_‘Old soul.’_

Bob’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold, but he carefully removed the ice pack and set it on the floor anyway as he very deliberately didn’t think of the various reasons that could lead to that particular sort of unresolved issue.

He ran with a bunch of fucking criminals. All of them had unresolved issues. One Two moved to a different part of town and still twitched when he heard Russian music. Sweet old Bertie was a hard, angry shell of a man with Stella gone. Cookie faced his issues every bloody time he went to do business with the junkies and the crack heads who got their gear off him. Johnny had daddy issues out the arse. Archy was an attack dog without a leash, forced into playing guard dog for a boy who didn’t know the first thing about stepping into Len’s shoes. Bob was down one issue now that he’d finally put to bed his stupid crush on One Two, but he still adamantly refused to bottom for anyone – he was gay, not a fucking fag, thank you. Potentially getting knifed in the bathroom didn’t really rate when it came to some of the others.

Neil slipped back into the living room with his sandwich and a glass of water, ghost-quiet, then slipped right back out again only to return with a pillow and a blanket. He tucked the pillow under Bob’s head with cautious, gentle hands, one hand cradling the back of his skull while the other slid the pillow between his head and the couch cushion, and spread the blanket, a soft, green, fleecy thing, over the rest of Bob’s body, from his toes to the base of his neck.

“Is that alright?”

“’S fantastic.”

Neil made a satisfied little sound and sat back down on the floor, taking up his sandwich in his left hand and eating it absentmindedly as he continued to type with his right.

“It’s not really fair,” Bob said, and damn it, he was thinking out loud again.

“What isn’t?” Neil asked, not looking up from what he was doing.

“Well, I was on the pull, wasn’t I? Sure, I got picked up by a good looking American, but the point was to get laid tonight, not lie around like one massive unsexy bruise.”

At that, Neil did look up, and it took him long enough to answer that Bob started feeling vague stirrings of unease. Christ, he’d really cocked it up, hadn’t he? _‘Too soon, Bobby-boy, too bloody soon.’_ Could he pass it off as a joke?

Bob opened his mouth to do just that, but Neil beat him to it.

“I don’t do one night stands anymore,” he said, “Especially not with people I actually like. On top of that, you’re still tipsy and concussed – not to mention the massive unsexy bruise, as you put it. If you’re still interested, we can grab breakfast and get to know each other a little better before swinging by and picking up your car tomorrow morning. And when you’re back to one hundred percent – again, if you’re still interested – you know where to find me.”

“That’s not a no,” Bob said slowly.

“That’s not a no,” Neil confirmed.

“Excellent.” Bob made himself marginally more comfortable on Neil’s couch and said, “I’m still gonna be interested, you know.”

“Go to sleep, Bob,” Neil said, sounding distracted and amused.

And with the lull of the keyboard’s soft clack-clack-clack in the background and the extra strength pain pills soothing his aches and pains, Bob slept.


	3. Now, Briefly, at Breakfast

“He really said that?” Ariadne asked as Arthur set the last plate of toast, scrambled eggs, and fruit down in front of her.

Eames drew himself up and put his hand over his heart. “Honest to God, he said every word.”

“You weren’t kidding when you said that Arthur and Eames didn’t exist back then. ‘Just try me, _motherfuckers_ ’,” Ariadne imitated poorly. “‘Just _try_ me, motherfuckers’.”

“No, no, that’s much too well enunciated,” Eames said. “Arthur, show her how it’s done.”

Arthur rolled his eyes and dug deep inside for the Kansas accent he’d hidden so well for so many years. Ariadne and Yusuf looked at him expectantly, and he favored them with his best ‘Imma fuck you up and enjoy doing it’ smile. “Just try me, motherfuckers.”

Ariadne ‘eeped’, flinching back a bit, then caught herself and laughed hysterically. “Okay, now I believe it!”

“You are one scary bastard, Arthur,” Yusuf said admiringly. “It is Arthur still, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t gone by Neil for the better part of a decade,” Arthur said. “Sometimes I use a different alias if I’m poking around under a PI license or investigating a mark in person, but it’s never Neil. Not anymore. Eames is, well –”

“There are a few people who call me Bob when we come ‘round to visit whenever we’re back in London,” Eames said. “They don’t quite know what we’re into, but they know Eames and Bob are one and the same. Still, they’re trustworthy people. I’m still not thrilled with being the recipient of Archy’s secondhand affection, though.”

“I can’t help it if we hit it off when we met,” Arthur said, and took a large bite of his eggs before the smirk lurking around the corners of his mouth could fully form. “And if it weren’t for Archy, your alias would have fallen to pieces before we got even halfway to accomplishing what I’d set out to do in the first place.”

Eames moodily stabbed at a slice of melon with his fork. “I hate being reminded I owe that slick, smug, smirking bastard so much.”

“Which one,” Arthur asked. “Me or Archy?”

Eames looked up from his plate to Arthur’s smirk and cracked up. “Alright, alright! You win.”

“Say it,” Arthur said. “‘Archy’s not that bad.’ Go on.”

“Archy’s less horrible than he used to be.”

“I’ll take it,” Arthur said.

“You’ll have to,” Eames said. “Archy’s a quality criminal, Arthur, but he and I are never going to be friends.”

“Eames, you know how when we go home, we’re going to go to your mother’s, and she’ll call you Bobby and me Arthur, and we’ll lie through our teeth about what we’ve been doing?” Eames nodded warily. “Guess who’s invited us for dinner to his place our second night back.”

“No,” Eames said, shaking his head vigorously. “ _No_. You told him? You called him up and said, ‘Hey, Arch, this is the last job I’m pulling with Cobb, me ‘n Bob will be back home soon, and by the way, I’m telling you this before I’m telling my own boyfriend, so keep a lid on it’?”

“It’s a standing invitation,” Arthur said patiently. “It’s been standing since Mal died and I took off to keep Dom from losing it. As far as I know, Johnny won’t even be there. It’s just the three of us, at his flat, having dinner and catching up. And him possibly making a kill list for any enemies we made while we were away.”

“If One Two were dead he’d be rolling in his grave,” Eames said.

“Well, he’s not,” Arthur said. He shot a sidelong glance at Eames and smirked. “It’s alright. Lenny can do the spinning for everyone.”

Yusuf leaned over and pounded on Eames’ back as he coughed, red faced. “As always, Arthur,” he said, taking another large gulp of his juice to soothe the burn of his accidental inhale from laughter, “Your timing is perfect.”

“Who’s Archy, and why doesn’t Eames like him?” Ariadne asked Arthur.

“Archy was my first contact in London’s whole big messy criminal underground. When he was just starting out, hardly out of his teens, he ended up owing this New Yorker a favor. Years went by, then a couple decades, and the guy never called in the marker,” Arthur said. “Then I start poking around and making a bit of a name for myself back home, and I meet this guy. He asks what I need, and I say that I need to get to London, and I need to get set up and established there, so that I can track down some important information. Well. The guy finally calls up Archy, and he says, ‘I want this kid out of my city. He’s like a miniature you when you were his age. Get him out of the country, set him up with what he needs, and we’ll call it even.’ I show up at Heathrow and it looks like Archy sent a driver to the airport – or at least, that’s what I thought at first. Then I get a good look at him. He’s no professional driver. He’s sizing me up as much as I’m sizing him up. No driver would do that. They’re all about discretion and courtesy. So I stuck my hand out and introduced myself, he did the same, and he ended up being an invaluable resource the entire time I was working the con. Now he’s sort of family.”

“What he is, Ariadne, is a combination of Arthur’s fairy godfather and guardian angel,” Eames said.

“And that’s a bad thing?” she asked tentatively.

“It’s bloody terrifying, is what it is,” Eames said, “And the only people who’d say otherwise are Arthur and Archy. What Arthur neglected to mention is that dear old Archy happens to be the man who _runs_ London’s big whole messy criminal underground. When Lenny Cole’s organization went to pieces, the heir apparent was an overgrown boy with a heroin problem, so while he was in a drug clinic, Archy picked up the pieces and got the whole thing back on track. For a while there was an excellent charade going that he’d done it to hand it over to Johnny in good condition, but no, Johnny’s just a figurehead with the right last name. Archy’s the real man at the top of the heap. So it wasn’t really a problem for me, since I didn’t intend to do anything nefarious to Arthur, but for anyone else in our line of work back then living in London, finding out that doing Arthur a wrong turn was the equivalent of pissing off Archy was very…disconcerting. To say the least.”

“What can I say,” Arthur said. “I’ve just always been so darn likeable.”

Eames laughed and threw a piece of toast at his head. “Get off it, you liar. Johnny fucking hates you.”

“Maybe time apart has mellowed him,” Arthur suggested without much hope as he caught the toast before it connected and took a bite. “Maybe he’s finally grown up and things won’t be so damn tense all the time with him and his ‘I’m older, taller, and have known Archy twenty years longer than you’ pissing contests he tries to start with me.”

“Or maybe he’s just going to keep sulking at you and leaving whatever room he’s in when you enter it,” Eames said. “Face it, Arthur. Johnny was supposed to be the prodigal son. Not so deep down, he was expecting welcome home parties and the ritual slaughter of the fatted calf. Then his beloved ‘Uncle Archy’ took a shine to some strange American kid a few years his junior while he was off at the clinic, and you’ve been the usurper in his mind ever since.”

“I’m not taking over the business, and he knows it,” Arthur said, annoyed. “And if I did – and that’s a big if – it would be at Archy’s explicit invitation once he’s ready to turn the reins over to someone, and I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can in dreamshare. That’s not to mention that Archy knows I’ll turn him down flat if you don’t want anything to do with it.”

“The two of you just get more interesting by the second,” Ariadne said. “First you’re like too good to be true dreamshare superspies, then you’re baby criminals with sarcasm problems –”

“Hey,” Arthur protested halfheartedly.

“Don’t ‘hey’ me, you know it’s true,” she said. “And now I hear you have ties to organized crime. This is like Punk’d, right? Any second now, a projection of Ashton Kutcher is going to come out of the bathroom with a camera just to capture our reactions.”

“It’s all true,” Arthur said. “Even though Eames likes to embellish things a little. However, my only tie to organized crime is Archy, and he’s never tried to steer me over to his side of the street.”

“It’s because he likes you,” Eames said. “It’s unnatural, Archy liking someone without a motive. It’s like One Two dating someone sane and middle class.”

“Enough, Eames,” Arthur said firmly. “You know perfectly well why Archy and I get along. It’s not anyone’s business but ours, and you _know_ it’s not unnatural.”

Eames looked momentarily abashed. “I know. It’s just…. You know I only met him after he finished his sentence. He made a point of being unlikeable. And when the topic turns to Archy, I just –”

“Channel One Two?” Arthur said.

“That’s about the long and short of it,” Eames said. “I’m sorry, love. I’ll lay off.”

“And you’ll come with me to dinner?”

“That, too,” Eames said. “Maybe Johnny will be there. That could be fun.”

“I think you just enjoy the novelty of watching someone get into it with Johnny without Archy stepping in to intercede on his behalf,” Arthur said.

“Well, it happens so rarely…”

Arthur gave him an unexpected smile. “If it keeps you from complaining about sitting down and eating dinner at Archy’s, then I’ll play the overachieving younger brother all you want if Johnny’s there. But I’m not asking Archy to invite him.”

“That’s your relationship with this Johnny, I take it?” Yusuf asked.

“Close enough,” Arthur said simply.

“Not really,” Eames contradicted him with a slight smile. “Johnny calls Archy his uncle, but he's got something of an unrequited crush on the old man. Archy, on the other hand, would probably adopt Arthur if Arthur would let him.”

“Not while Ellen’s still alive,” Arthur said. “She’s not doing well, but she’s still hanging in there.”

Ariadne’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “Ellen?”

“Arthur’s mum,” Eames said.

“Neil’s mom,” Arthur corrected him. “Cirrhosis of the liver.”

“You really did stop being Neil, didn’t you?” Ariadne said, looking down at the table sadly. “Oh, Arthur….”

Arthur reached out and tapped her cheek. When she looked up, he aimed a reassuring smile at her. “Don’t feel bad for me, Ari. Neil was…Neil wasn’t a good person. Not really. By the time I met Eames, I’d already put a lot of work into making Arthur real. You wouldn’t have liked Neil. Arthur’s a much better person to be. I’m happier as Arthur. Let it be, okay?”

Ariadne scrutinized his face for a long, uncomfortably close moment before smiling a bit and tapping his cheek as well. “Okay, Arthur. I’ll let it be. But just remember that you want Yusuf and me as a permanent part of the team. On some level you know that’s because I care about you as a friend, and not just a point man.”

“Same here, but in a more macho, manly, not-discussing-our-emotions kind of way,” Yusuf said. Arthur ducked his head and laughed.

“That sounds much safer than the Ariadne method of how to win friends and influence people.”

“Yes, there is an element of risk involved to how Ariadne tackles interpersonal relationships,” Eames said. “But it’s a bit entertaining to watch when you’re not the one being subjected to her tactics.”

“Idiot,” Arthur said fondly.

“And I love you,” Eames murmured, leaning in too close for Yusuf or Ariadne to overhear. “I did when you were Neil, when you were Arthur part-time, when you became Arthur all the time – I do even when you’re a silly southern Californian accent over the telephone poking about with your PI license. All of you, Arthur. All of you.”

“And that’s why I took you away with me when I left,” Arthur whispered back. “I couldn’t leave you behind when you loved me in all my disturbed and flawed glory.”

“I thought you just let me come,” Eames said quietly, “Because I was bored and the sex was good.”

Arthur grinned and leaned back in his chair, balancing on the back two legs. “And you thought you thought you got the better part of the deal this whole time.”

“Still do, darling,” Eames replied, an unabashed smile on his face. “I still absolutely do.”

“No fair being disgustingly romantic at each other while I’m stuck in an extended hostile dream and my wife is in a different continent,” Yusuf said. “If I can’t have Malika here, then you can’t make eyes at each other and talk about sex and your squishy romantic feelings.”

“I propose a necessary amendment to that,” Ariadne said. “Not in front of Yusuf, or out of your story.”

“Why do they have to do it in their story?” Yusuf complained good-naturedly.

Ariadne sighed at him like he was a particularly dimwitted child rather than the brilliant chemist he truly was. “Can’t you tell already? They’re telling a love story.”

“They aren’t!” Yusuf protested. “There was a concussion and pickpocketing and cyber-crime. That’s the start of a textbook adventure story.”

“It is an adventure,” Eames said. “And it’s a mystery, and a bit of a spy thriller with no proper protagonists to speak of, since not a one of us wore white hats, and a criminal caper, and a dash of a travel literature feel to it – and yes, Yusuf, Ariadne’s right, too. It’s a love story as well.”

“Of course you couldn’t stick to a single genre,” Yusuf said. “That would’ve been much too easy for you.”

“Humanity’s just a little too messy for such neat boxes,” Arthur said. “Life’s nowhere near that simple.”

“It’s experimenting with chemistry without putting labels on your ingredients,” Eames said. “Messy, loud, dangerous, prone to the occasional explosion….”

Yusuf grinned in delight. “I’ll never forget that comparison. Should I give you credit when I inevitably use it later on?”

“Nah, mate,” Eames said, waving his suggestion away. “It was a friend in school who said it to me first, years ago. I’m just passing it on to the right person.”

“That’s right,” Ariadne said. “You went to law school.”

“But I dropped out, so that’s alright,” Eames said hastily. “I never actually followed through with becoming fully respectable. I promise.”

Ariadne groaned. “Someone hit him for me, please. Arthur, tell me you don’t have the same attitude towards higher education.”

“Don’t look at me,” Arthur said. “Aside from plowing my way through all the computer courses at the local city college, I never went further than high school, academically.”

“But you’re so smart – and you know so much,” Ariadne said, wide-eyed.

“I’m a big fan of self-study,” Arthur said.

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one,” Eames said. 

“I wasn’t sure you’d recognize one, given how much you love hyperboles,” Arthur said.

“You’re discriminating against my natural-born storytelling instincts,” Eames said. “That’s horrible.”

“If you’d just tell a story straight without exaggerating for effect more than once in a blue moon, I’d be less inclined towards skepticism.”

Eames managed a very convincing hurt look for a brief moment before bouncing back with a carefree smile. “I’m telling our story straight, aren’t I?”

“Yes. Well done. If you make it all the way to the end without a ridiculous – no, strike that, any exaggeration, then I’ll concede that you are, in fact, a far more superior storyteller than I’ve ever given you credit for before.” With the conversation safely steered away from his ( _from Neil's_ ) educational shortcomings, Arthur tried to come up with a new topic to fill the hole left by the old one.

“That means I’ll have to pick and choose the best bits to tell,” Eames said. “Only the ones that are really interesting.”

“I want to hear everything, though,” Ariadne said with a stunningly good fake pout.

“I’m not sure I want to know what you think the best bits are,” Yusuf added.

“You don’t want to hear everything, Ariadne, and if you stick that lip out any farther, a bird might mistake it as a perch,” Eames said. “And it’s too late now, Yusuf. You already want to know what happens next, don’t you? I have you in my clutches. The power is all mine.”

“You forgot the evil cackle,” Arthur said, and watched Eames mentally replay his last few sentences.

“Did I? How irresponsible of me. Well, insert evil cackle here.”

“Am I going to be as crazy as them after I’ve spent half a dozen years working in dreamshare?” Ariadne asked Yusuf warily.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yusuf said genially. “They’re as sane as I am.”

“Thanks,” Ariadne said, carefully scooting her chair a couple inches away from the table. “That’s really reassuring.”

Yusuf succumbed to laughter first, which tipped Eames over the edge, leaving both of them laughing like schoolboys into the remains of their breakfast. Arthur was the lone holdout by sheer willpower alone, and he hooked his foot under one of the legs of Ariadne’s chair and tugged her back over. Well. He liked Ariadne. He could give her advance warning about at least one of the issues with working in dreamshare.

“There’s something you should know about this job,” he said. “It’s going to seem really obvious in retrospect when I tell you. Time moves faster down here than up in the real world. If you work in dreamshare, you spend a lot of time down here. Consequently –”

“You feel like you’re older than you really are,” Ariadne finished. “So this is –”

“Technically we’re still on the job, but when the hard part’s over and I get paid, my way of dealing with feeling like I just aged six months in the course of a few weeks is to go find Eames at one of our safe houses, stop being the consummate professional everyone wants to hire for a while, and just blow off steam.” Arthur smiled at her. “Sometimes, after a job like this, you have to act your shoe size and not your age for a few minutes. It keeps you from going completely insane.”

“He eats pizza and wears jeans when he’s not on the job,” Eames said. “They’re really nice jeans, but I mean, denim. He’ll wear it. And he goes around barefoot and leaves the pomade out of his hair.”

Arthur laughed. “Eames wears t-shirts and jeans that aren’t really nice. We play video games and watch bad horror movies and read books and –” he glanced at Yusuf “—do what every couple does when they’re alone and in their own home.”

“Thank you for your kind self-censorship, Arthur; that was very considerate of you,” Yusuf said. “I can’t believe I’m turning right around and flying back to Mombasa after we land. Madness. Then again, Malika.”

Ariadne got to her feet and started to gather up the dirty plates and glasses. “Okay, Eames. We fed you –”

“I made breakfast, Ari,” Arthur interrupted.

“Arthur fed you,” she continued, undaunted, “We listened to your jokes, and your silly argument with Arthur, and we didn’t hurry you along. Breakfast is over, buddy. Time to tell us the next part.”

“You are a bossy one, aren’t you,” Eames said in admiration. “Alright. Well, breakfast after waking up was nothing to write home about, though we did swap numbers and see each other once later that week. It was only when I got a phone call from him that was a little bit odd that my life started to circle the rabbit hole.”


	4. Then, The Birth of Eames

Bob lined up his cue and readied himself to break the balls. A shit-eating grin on Mumbles’ face made him groan in realization, and he straightened, laying his cue across the table.

“What, One Two?”

“Nothing,” One Two said, so innocently that Bob was instantly suspicious. “Just wondering when we’re going to meet your knight in shining armor, that’s all.”

Bob touched his still-tender ribs and glared. “It’s been less than two weeks. I’m not throwing him to the wolves.” Or the Wild Bunch to the wolf, as the case may be, he added silently. “Besides. He’s not my knight in shining armor.”

“Oh, so he didn’t come flying in out of nowhere to help you when three great big fucking idiots jumped you?” One Two asked.

“Yeah, but it was kind of a calculated rescue, you know, since he only helped me out after he picked their pockets while they were busy with me,” Bob said. “Haven’t I already told you this three times?”

“Now why would you want to date a man who puts lifting wallets over saving someone else’s hide?” Mumbles wondered.

“He gave me half,” Bob said. He grinned. Here was something he hadn’t told them before. “And he’s an awful scary bastard when he wants to be. He only took one of ‘em down, you know. Frightened the other two off just talking at them. And pulling out a knife, but I think that was just for show. Once they were gone, away went scary bastard Neil, and I got to meet actual Neil instead. I quite like him.”

“He scared them off by talking at them,” One Two repeated in disbelief. “What does he look like, the fucking Hulk?”

“I thought I told you what he looks like,” Bob said.

“No, you didn’t,” Mumbles said. “So for all our sakes, if only to keep One Two from goin’ on about how lovely his new lady is for a couple minutes, relieve our curiosity and tell us about your man from America, will you?”

Bob looked around and saw that even Fred and Cookie had put a hold on their card game to hear what he had to say.

“Alright. Well. He doesn’t look like the fucking Hulk, for starters, One Two. He’s about my height, maybe a bit taller – no more than half an inch or so. And Christ, is he a wiry fucker. Looks like a good stiff wind could knock him off his feet. That said, if I knew him any better, I might have to flip a coin to choose between having him or One Two at my back in a fight.”

“He’s that good, eh?” One Two asked.

“If it wasn’t so sexy, I’d call it scary,” Bob said.

“That’s just his approximate height and weight covered,” Cookie called over, tapping a pen against a sheet of paper. “Tell us the rest.”

“He has brown hair,” Bob said, “Dark brown, the real dark brown that only shows up brown under lights. It’s longer and kind of curly, but not really curly, at the top and the front, but not all that short on the sides, either. His eyes are blue, really blue. He’s not one for smiling a whole lot – well, not real smiles – but when he does, he’s got these big fucking dimples and they’re gorgeous, and I swear to God, he looks like he’s a good four or five years younger than he really is, but he’s twenty-two and says that being taken for younger has come in handy before, I dunno why.”

One Two shook his head and smiled, hiding his face behind his hand, and Mumbles, the fucker, was out and out chuckling at him. 

“You, my friend, are sweet on him,” Mumbles said. “Christ. This is fucking adorable. Go on, Handsome. Tell us some more. Where’s he from?”

“He said New York City, but his accent says otherwise,” Bob said. “It’s not like any I’ve ever heard on the telly or in movies. He, well, he kind of mumbles, Mumbles.”

Cookie cut across Mumbles’ laughter to ask sharply, “How does he dress, Handsome? What’s he wear?”

“I’ve only seen him twice since he dropped me back at my car after we had breakfast,” Bob said, thinking back. “Er, jeans? T-shirts? Jackets and sweatshirts? Trainers? I don’t know, Cookie. He dresses ordinary. He does have some nice clothes in his closet, though, suits and ties and shiny dress shoes and proper button up shirts.”

“Button up or button down?” One Two asked, suddenly keenly interested.

“Both, actually,” Bob said. “And there were a couple shirts meant for cufflinks.”

“How the hell do you know this stuff?” Mumbles asked.

“Went to school with a bunch of toffs and had a crush on this fashion-obsessed idiot,” Bob said easily, pointing to One Two.

“Better your new fella than me,” One Two said with a crooked smile. Bob returned it. He’d never got it out of either One Two or Mumbles what Mumbles had said almost half a year ago now, but he and One Two were better than ever thanks to his intervention.

“Yeah, you’re not joking,” Bob said.

“Bob,” Cookie said, “Your Neil. Does he ever slick his hair back? With pomade or the like?”

“No,” Bob said slowly. “But he has a little tub of it on his bathroom counter. Why?”

“Ah. Well.” Cookie cleared his throat and folded up the paper he’d been taking notes on several times over before shoving it in his breast pocket behind his waistcoat. “Just. I’m sure he likes you a great deal, Handsome, and that’s something quite special. Don’t let old Cookie’s paranoia ruin your fun.”

“Cookie, if you weren’t a bit paranoid, you, me, or the lot of us would’ve died or been hauled up before a magistrate a dozen times over,” One Two said. “What you have isn’t paranoia. It’s a highly advanced survival skill. Out with it. What’s the matter?”

“It’s probably more dangerous to voice my suspicions outright than to keep my mouth shut,” Cookie said, “So I’ll only say this, and remember, I never said anything, got it, Bob? Don’t do anything, and I mean anything, to piss him off, upset him, or do him a wrong turn. It ain’t only him you’re upsetting.”

With that, Cookie turned back to his game with Fred, who gave a shrug and picked up his cards again. Mumbles and One Two walked over to hound Cookie for more answers. As for Bob, he didn’t need to bother Cookie for more answers. It was ridiculous. He knew it was ridiculous. It sounded like some sort of crazy Godfather-esque Mafioso fairytale. There was nothing less likely than an American newcomer having friends so high up the food chain that it gave Cookie of all people reason to pause. He was about to join Mumbles and One Two at the table to tell Cookie how absolutely fucking ridiculous it was when his mobile rang.

A hush settled over his friends as they looked his way.

“Is that him?” One Two mouthed.

Bob nodded.

Mumbles waved his hand at him as if to say, “Well, answer it already!”

Bob rolled his eyes, turned his back, and answered his mobile, pretending that four of his friends weren’t blatantly eavesdropping. “Neil,” he said warmly. “How are things?”

“Things are great,” his not-quite-boyfriend said. “How are you doing? Healing up okay?”

“Still kind of sore, but the bruises are mostly faded, and I should be just fine by the end of the week,” Bob said. “Don’t tell me you called to check up on my health.”

“A little, but I have an ulterior motive for it,” Neil said. “Are you free this Friday evening? Around sixish?”

“I can be,” Bob said. “Why? What’s going on?”

“You already know I managed to get my way into the gallery opening,” Neil said. “I finally got word that I’m invited to the dinner party that a small number of the guests are headed to afterwards, and I’ve been told I can bring a plus one. I don’t want to just use you like this, but bringing a date will make me seem more established, like I have ties to the community – like I’m putting down roots, you know? So I was hoping you’d be willing. The first half’s all going to be pretentious idiots talking about art like it’s something they’re experts about when they really don’t know shit about it, and the second half is going to be about passive-aggressively one upping each other at dinner with manners, possessions, vacations, children, blah, blah, blah, but one of the people at the dinner is someone who might have a lead on the guy I’m trying to track down. Are you in?”

“Oh, you know me,” Bob said. “I’m always up for an evening of wankers droning on about things they don’t know anything about, followed by a refreshing course of toffs making idiots out of themselves in public. ….That’s a yes, Neil. I’m in. Sounds like it could actually be sort of fun.”

“It’s always fun when you’re going in undercover,” Neil said. “Quick, give me a last name you like that people won’t immediately associate with you.”

“Eames,” Bob said after a moment’s reflection. “It’s my godmother’s maiden name.”

“Good. And a first name you can stand hearing on a semi-regular basis that isn’t your own.”

“Ah. Tough one. Let’s go with Patrick,” Bob said. “It’s a family name, but it hasn’t been used for four generations now.”

“I’ll pass this on to one of my contacts, and you’ll have a full set of brand new IDs and bank cards by the time the gallery opening comes around,” Neil said. “Uh, how well do you pull off upper class?”

“Darling, law school was overflowing with old money idiots,” Bob said, pulling out a spot-on Southampton accent for demonstration purposes. “If you need me to play the idle rich, I’m more than capable of obliging.”

“Not the idle rich,” Neil said. “Just someone who grew up around wealth, but decided to strike out and become a self-made man. It’s an important distinction. It changes your entire attitude. And before I forget, do you have a suit?”

“I have a suit,” Bob said.

“Is it a suit that you’ve worn to something other than a wedding, funeral, or court appearance in the last couple years? Is it more than a few years old?”

“Alright, I don’t have a suit you’d approve of,” Bob amended.

“Don’t worry about it,” Neil said. “I know a guy. I’ll give him a call and have him come pick you up to take you suit shopping. Made to measure should be the best bet with our time frame. Where are you? I’ll send him around right away.”

“I’m at the Speeler,” Bob said. “Know it?”

To his surprise, Neil started laughing. “Oh my God. You’re _that_ Bob. I should have guessed. Yeah, I know where the Speeler is. Let me give my friend a call. He’ll be around soon.”

“What do you mean, ‘that Bob’?” Bob asked. “You’ve heard of us?”

“I’ve got friends with lots of interesting stories about you and the Wild Bunch,” Neil said. “The one about taking down Lenny Cole is priceless. So’s the one with the Chechen war criminals. I’ll tell you what; if even half of what I’ve heard is true, life’s about to get a whole lot more interesting, because there’s no way I’m gonna play the long con without you. It’d be a fucking waste of talent.”

“I’m game,” Bob said. “It sounds interesting enough. But you’re going to have to tell me who told you about me.”

“I will,” Neil said. “Eventually.” The smirk was clear in his voice. “I’m going to call my friend now. Don’t go anywhere. He’ll be there soon.”

“Will do,” Bob said. “See you Friday, then.”

“Friday,” Neil confirmed. “Till then.”

Just like Bob was getting used to, Neil hung up without waiting for or saying a proper goodbye. He turned back around to face his friends and said, “Looks like I’m helping Neil out with his con this Friday. And apparently I’m going suit shopping.”

“From the sound of it, you’re doing more than just helping him out this weekend,” Fred commented. “He’s making you a fake ID, is he?”

“That’s what he says,” Bob said. “Could be fun. It probably will be fun.”

“You sure you want to get involved, Handsome?” Cookie asked. “It’s probably a sight more dangerous than our usual.”

“Yeah, but I’m bored,” Bob said. “This is so much more interesting than anything we’ve done in months. I could use the entertainment. Helping Neil run a long con is definitely entertaining.”

“Just don’t forget about us while you’re out playing criminal masterminds with your new boyfriend,” One Two said.

“Right, I won’t,” Bob said. “And you are?”

Mumbles guffawed and rejoined Bob at the pool table. “It was your turn to break, wasn’t it?”

Bob and Mumbles made it through one and a half games – Mumbles winning the first narrowly, Bob slowly eking out a lead during the second – before the buzzer sounded. Fred got up from the table and went to press the intercom to speak to the person ringing the Speeler from the outside.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Tank, Fred,” came the sedate answer. “I’ve come to collect Bob for his suit shopping expedition. Shall I come up, or will you send him out?”

“Come on in, son,” Fred said, and buzzed him in.

Tank came strolling in the door, resplendent in a dove gray suit with matching waistcoat, and looked slowly around the room before catching sight of Bob. He smiled and nodded to himself, speaking his thoughts aloud as he did. “Yes, definitely, Neil had the right of it; Zegna’s the way to go for Handsome. No waistcoat, though, can’t have him looking too matchy-matchy with Neil. Three button, certainly, and a double vent – oh, I miss those days. Pity about the hair, but there’s nothing to be done there until it grows. I suppose we could always say you’ve recently left the service. Bob,” he said, addressing him directly for the first time, “You’ll need to give your facial hair a trim if you’re going to look even the least bit like you belong in the sort of suit we’re buying you.”

Bob grimaced and rubbed his cheek. “It’s a small sacrifice, I suppose.”

“For a made-to-measure designer suit?” Tank said. “It’s not a sacrifice at all. Come along, Handsome. Daylight’s wasting, and we have at least three shops to visit before we call it a day.”

With a bewildered look over his shoulder at the boys, Bob followed Tank back out the door and out into the overcast London afternoon.

“Do you have any strong preferences about your lapels?” Tank asked.

Bob gave him a blank look.

“Good, good. I was thinking you’d do well with either notch or cloverleaf lapels for one, maybe two of your suit jackets.”

“I’m getting more than one?” Bob asked weakly.

Tank laughed and ushered him into the passenger seat of his SUV. “Just relax and let your pal Tank take care of you. Neil and I have it all worked out.”

“Oh,” Bob said to the interior of the car as Tank went around to the other side. “That’s very reassuring.”

* * *

It wasn’t until they were being driven back to Neil’s flat after the dinner party – the post-gallery opening _four course menu_ dinner party, which Tank had thoughtfully provided a diagram for so that Bob could keep the fish fork and meat forks straight in his head, along with the white wine glass, red wine glass, and water glass, which all looked too bloody similar to be believed – that Bob’s shock at Neil’s appearance wore off enough for him to say something besides, “Fucking hell. I believe you. You’re a con man.”

It wasn’t just Neil’s appearance that had changed, either, although that was a drastic change in itself. Bob had grown used to seeing him in jeans and t-shirts under warm jackets. Tonight he was wearing a white collared shirt with subtle, extremely thin pinstripes in dark green and golden brown, offset by his tie, a stunning silk number in soft shades of golds and browns, just like a tree at the height of autumn, and muted sandy gray suit trousers and a matching waistcoat. His suit jacket was lying across his knees as he lounged back in his seat and watched Bob watch him through deep brown eyes, courtesy of what Bob could only assume were color contacts. His hair, as Cookie had predicted, was slicked back and straight, and he actually looked exactly his age for once.

But no, it wasn’t just his appearance, though the contacts had given him a turn. The way he walked, the way he talked, his vocabulary, how he interacted with people – all of it had changed. Neil’s mumbled, profanity-laden accent was suddenly just like those American actors Eames had always heard in movies and on the telly, no regional markers to speak of except for a hardly noticeable sharpness that marked him as a New Yorker. Bob would bet good money that Neil did that on purpose, just to add authenticity. Gone was Neil’s ‘fuck you’ walk as well. The anti-Neil walked with a purposeful stride – though Bob wasn’t certain if the vague hint of danger he exuded when he moved was something he did on purpose or not. Bob hadn’t heard so much as a “damn” or a “shit” from Neil all night, but his vocabulary had practically doubled in size. It was a relief to discover that he was still a sarcastic bastard no matter whose skin he wore, but even there, Neil’s alias seemed far more deadpan than the man himself, and his sense of humor was bone dry.

Bob cast about for something to say, something meaningful, something that would boil it all down to its essentials and make everything suddenly make sense.

Unfortunately, he was fresh out of meaningful.

“Scalise?” he asked. “Arthur Scalise? Why Scalise? Why not something less memorable?”

“Arthur’s supposed to be from Manhattan,” Neil said. “There are a lot of Italian-Americans in New York. It adds a little realism to the fiction. And the trouble with picking something less memorable when you’re crafting a long-term alias is the possibility that you’ll choose something that will eventually catch the attention of an overzealous cop who thinks to himself, ‘Arthur Jones sounds like it might be a fake name’, and decides to do some digging. The next thing you know, you’re out an identity you’ve invested years in.”

“You’ve put some thought into this,” Bob observed.

Neil tugged his tie loose – _‘four over hand,’_ a voice in the back of his head sounding suspiciously like Tank whispered – just a bit and undid his top button, nodding. “More than you can guess.”

“Did the dinner pay off?” Bob asked. “I couldn’t tell.”

“I won’t know for a while,” Neil said, shrugging eloquently. “I was really sounding Clarkson out and feeding him just enough information for him to either be curious enough to meet me again, or worried enough to go to someone higher up on the food chain. Maybe even the man I’m looking for.”

“If you need me to come along as a date to something else, or even just to tag along just for the hell of it, I’ll tell you right now that I’d love to,” Bob said.

“I’d be glad to have you,” Neil said. “You’re a natural at this. You make an excellent partner.”

“How stuck in Arthur’s skin are you right now?” Bob asked, simultaneously amused and a bit alarmed.

Neil held up his hand, palm down, and wiggled it back and forth. “About fifty, maybe sixty percent,” he said. “I’ll be completely back to myself by tomorrow morning, but a change of clothes and taking out my contacts will help.”

“Yeah, I wanted to ask,” Bob said. “Why the contacts?”

“It’s another layer of separation between Arthur and Neil,” Neil said. “When I look in the mirror and don’t see my own eyes, it’s a helpful reminder that I’m not supposed to be Neil right now.”

“I don’t know if this’ll help or just make it take longer to get back to yourself, but I like Arthur, too,” Bob said. “If you and Arthur weren’t the same person, I’d feel kind of guilty for some of the thoughts I’m having about you in those clothes.”

Neil laughed. “As long as you don’t start making requests for Arthur to show up outside of the con, enjoy away. And don’t feel guilty. If I wasn’t already going to hell, I’d sure as shit be going there now. I’m not sure whether to admire you from a distance or peel you out of your suit piece by piece.”

“Second option, please,” Bob said. He waited a beat and added casually, “Hey, Neil?”

“Mmhmm?”

“I’m all healed up now. No bruises, no pain. Totally, completely back to normal.”

Neil arched an eyebrow at him. “Yes?”

“I’m still interested.”

“Really?” 

Neil shot a look up front at the driver, unbuckled his seat belt, and slid over to sit pressed against Bob. He laid a hand on Bob’s cheek, turning his face toward his, and leaned in to kiss him softly. It was a slow, sweet, anticipatory kiss, full of promise as much as it was of tenderness and affection. A fleeting thought crossed Bob’s mind to take control and deepen it, but no sooner had he had the idea, the hand on his cheek migrated to the back of his neck and did exactly that.

This was a promise of an entirely different nature. Neil held the reins and didn’t hand them over, delving in and exploring so seductively that Bob, as distracted as he was by both accepting and attempting to reciprocate at least half as skillfully such a truly lovely kiss, still had room in the tiniest corner of his mind to be jealous of Neil’s past boyfriends.

It was their loss, anyway. Bob was the beneficiary of Neil’s absolutely brilliant sexual experience, and he had no intention of giving him up, no matter what.

Neil pulled back slowly, and someone whimpered. It wasn’t Bob. Not a bit. Then again, given Neil’s slightly amused smile hovering around his mouth beneath his dark, wide pupils, Bob could’ve possibly been lying to himself.

“We’ll get to the flat in five minutes,” Neil said, retaking his seat and buckling his seatbelt again. “I think that can hold me over until then. How about you?”

“Five minutes?” Bob asked.

“Five minutes.”

Bob let his head drop back against the head rest and fumbled blindly for Neil’s hand. Once it was in his, he twined his fingers through Neil’s and squeezed. “You’re a menace.”

Neil laughed and squeezed back.

Five minutes was an eternity, but finally, fucking finally, the driver let them out at Arthur’s flat, and they dashed to the front door, Bob practically plastering both their sharp-dressed selves to the door in his eagerness to get inside.

Neil elbowed him gently in his good side. “I can’t get at my keys like this.”

“Sorry, love.” He moved back about two inches. 

He couldn’t stop grinning. He’d never met anyone like Neil before, and Neil was actually interested in him, in Bob, and if that kiss in the car was any indication, they were about to head off to the bedroom to go have some bloody amazing sex, and Mumbles was right, he was sweet on him, he fancied him quite a lot, and if Neil got any more interesting or likeable, Bob might just fall arse over tit in love with him, and wasn’t that doing things backwards, since all they’d done was kiss, even if it was one hell of a kiss – 

The door opened. Neil tugged Bob in after him, down the hall to his flat near the back of the staircase. One more turn of the key, and they were in.

Neil looked at Bob.

Bob looked at Neil.

“Fuck it,” Neil muttered, and grabbed Bob by the lapels, pulling him into another one of his breath-stealing kisses. 

He led Bob through the living room and down the hall to the bedroom without breaking the kiss, walking backwards confidently as he slowly but methodically stripped him of his fancy clothing. Bob eagerly returned the favor. By the time they reached the bedroom, they were both down to their trousers and shoes.

Something seemed to come over Neil then, and he very gently pushed Bob a step back and took a deep, calming breath.

Bob wanted to reach for him again, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t be appreciated, even if the conflicted, serious expression on Neil’s face just made him want to engulf him in an enormous hug. “What is it?”

“There are things,” Neil said. “About sex. And me. I probably should’ve said something back in the living room, or something, but shit, I just – I was being selfish, and I wanted to pretend to be normal for a couple minutes. I have these rules. Wendy – my friend Wendy, her co-worker is big into kink and calls them something like ‘hard limits’ or shit like that. Her psych major friend calls them something else, I don’t remember what.”

That last sentence was pretty clearly a lie, as Neil obviously remembered exactly what this friend of a friend had called his rules, but Bob wasn’t about to call him out. It seemed like this was hard enough for Neil to get out without Bob policing his honesty level. “I’m listening,” he said as encouragingly as he could.

Neil nodded his head jerkily. “Okay. Um. Dirty talk. Don’t know if you’re into that, but if you are, ‘slut’ isn’t okay. Call me that and I’ll just get up and fucking call you a cab back to your place. ‘Whore’ isn’t as bad, but it’s not a turn on. It’s kind of a turn off, actually. I’m okay with giving head, but I need to be in control of it. No grabbing my head. Definitely no face fucking. I know a lot of people who talk about how much they like doing it in the shower or the bathtub, but that’s pretty much the last fucking place on Earth I’m ever gonna willingly have sex. And…and I don’t bottom. I just don’t. I might in the future, someday, but that’s a big fucking if. So if any of that’s gonna be a problem, speak up.”

The first item on Neil’s list had Bob baffled, but by the time Neil reached the end, it was all painfully clear. Stabbing someone over intruding on his privacy in the toilet suddenly seemed far less minor than Bob had written it off as the night they’d met. _‘Massive unresolved issues is right.’_

“Can I hug you?” Bob asked, instead of “Is the bastard dead, and if not, what’s his address?”

Neil gave him a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “Would it bother you if I initiated it instead?”

“Not a bit,” Bob said, and opened his arms wide. Neil laughed and stepped into them easily, wrapping Bob up in a hug that was just on the right side of tight, his wiry arms anchoring him to the present as his brain drifted off to process what he’d just learned.

What did it change about him and Neil, really? He understood Neil a bit better, but it didn’t make him want him any less. He was still crazy about Neil. Neil was smart and scary and sarcastic and sexy and all the best ‘s’ adjectives in the English language. Someone did something fucking awful to him, but that didn’t make him stop being smart or scary or sarcastic or sexy just because Bob knew about it now. Sure, Bob knew, and he’d remember, but when he looked at Neil in the future, this conversation wasn’t going to drown everything else out. Neil was still Neil, and Bob was still bloody lucky.

He considered and immediately dismissed the idea of bending his personal rule just for Neil. Nah. He wasn’t that kind of gay. He waved a regretful farewell to penetrative sex for the foreseeable future and turned his attention back to the here and now, and the ridiculously gorgeous man hugging him.

“I want to be with you,” Bob said quietly, “If you’ll still have me.”

“Even with all that?” Neil asked him, just as quietly. “I know what I cleaned that cut on your head with.” He tugged at Bob’s back left trouser pocket briefly in emphasis.

“Doesn’t matter,” Bob said. “You matter more. I’d rather be with you and not fucking anyone than not with you and getting laid on the regular. It’s different, yeah, but there’s a damn good reason for that, and besides, there’s lots we can do that don’t involve cocks in arses.”

Neil touched his forehead to Bob’s, snickering. “Very true. And I think you managed to out-crude me.”

“How about this,” Bob said. “Let’s finish getting naked and take advantage of that very nice bed right there. Then we can sleep in and have breakfast in your kitchen instead of braving the November weather.”

“That’s a great plan,” Neil said as he started to work open Bob’s belt one-handed. “Straightforward. Action-oriented. Takes more than the immediate future into account. You’re good at this planning thing.”

“Agreed,” Bob said.

Between the two of them, they made short work of the rest of their clothes, and fell into bed together. Bob did his best to remember everything – he tried desperately to capture the memory of their first time together in its entirety so he could go back and replay it when he was alone and missing Neil – but clarity of thought was swallowed up by sweat and touch and Bob gasping and squirming and making the most ridiculous fucking sounds to ever come out of his mouth as he fell apart under Neil’s strong, skillful hands and Arthur’s intense, dark stare. When his brain stopped resembling mush and his hands stopped shaking, Bob returned the favor as best he could, pulling out all his best tricks in one go just to keep his ego from being smashed by someone who was far too talented at sex for Bob’s sanity.

When they were both lying side by side, gleaming with sweat and breathing hard, Neil looked at Bob and grinned. “Still good even without any fucking involved?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Bob said. “End of this month, I turn twenty-eight. If we keep having sex this good, I’m going to have a heart attack before I turn twenty-nine.”

Neil laughed softly. “I’m going to go take my contacts out before I accidentally fall asleep with them in. Be right back.” He sat up and slid slowly off the bed, giving Bob an excellent view of a small line of writing tattooed across his right scapula.

And unless he was mistaken, which he doubted he was, five people contributed their handwriting to that single line of Latin.

He shrugged to himself and slid under the covers. It wasn’t like he couldn’t ask. In fact –

“Why do you have a quote from Hannibal on your back?” Bob asked as soon as Neil joined him in bed and turned off the lamp on the bedside table.

“Hmm?”

“Hannibal. ‘Aut viam inveniam aut faciam’. ‘I will either find a way or make one’. Why the ink?”

“I saw the quote in one of Eric’s history books when I went back to Kansas to visit, and it felt like it fit, considering where my life was right then,” Neil said. “I got him, Wendy, and Brian to all copy it out, and I wrote it, and then I wrote it in Arthur’s handwriting, and when I decided which word got which handwriting, I gave it to Wendy. It was the first tattoo she ever did at her job at the tattoo parlor.”

“It suits you,” Bob said.

He could hear the smile in Neil’s voice as he said simply, “Thanks.”

Neil scooted closer to the center of the bed, pressing up against Bob’s back as he hooked his chin over Bob’s shoulder and threw his arm over his waist. “Fair warning,” he said, slotting their legs together so it felt comfortable, and natural, and so very easy to lean back into him, “I’m a cuddler at night.”

“Wonderful,” Bob said, relaxing into Neil. “I start freezing when I sleep. You can keep me warm.”

“It’s a deal.”

They were quiet for several minutes, long enough for Bob to start drifting off. Then Neil spoke up in an almost-whisper.

“Bob? Did you ever consider….”

“Mmh? C’ns’der what?”

“Letting me top? Did you think about it, even for a second?”

“Mmf. Thought ‘bout it. Little bit. Very little bit. ‘Cided no.”

“Why?”

“’M gay, but ‘m not tha’ gay. Tha’ kinda gay.”

“Oh.”

“Neil?”

“It’s alright. Go back to sleep, Bob.”

Bob slept. But despite the cozy heat, the warm embrace, and the fantastic sex that had led up to spending the night in Neil’s bed, his sleep was unsettled. A half-remembered conversation that he was positive was a dream had worked its way into his unconscious mind, and even though he was aware on some level that the arms around him belonged to Neil, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d managed to finally disappoint him.

But morning came eventually, and with it, a messy-haired, blue-eyed Neil with a smile just for Bob, and the disturbing feeling and associated conversation were set aside and forgotten.


	5. Now, A Broken Fairytale

Ariadne’s eyes were wet when Eames wrapped up his second installment of their story. She turned a mournful face at Arthur and simply stared, apparently at a loss for words.

“Shooting lesson time,” Arthur said brusquely, heading off whatever Ariadne was going to say or do at the pass. “Eames? How’s the floor below look for a shooting range?”

“We can have it fixed up as one in no time at all,” Eames said. “I’ll take our resident architect down with me to reinforce and soundproof the walls, and I’ll put her and Yusuf through their paces until I’m satisfied.”

“But!” Ariadne protested. “But what about Arthur? What about what happened? Aren’t we going to talk about that?”

“You might be hearing this just now, Ari, but it happened almost a dozen years ago,” Arthur said.

“Still,” Ariadne said. “It’s important. You were –”

“Ariadne,” Eames interrupted. “Come help me create a shooting range.”

At last, Ariadne seemed to get that the last thing Arthur wanted from her at the moment was teary-eyed sympathy, righteous indignation on his behalf, or the overwhelming curiosity she specialized in – and currently, she was attempting to give him all three at once. “Okay,” she said reluctantly, getting to her feet and slowly following Eames to the door of the loft. “Coming, Yusuf?”

“I’m right behind you,” he said. “I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

She squinted at him suspiciously, but Arthur honestly had no problem with Yusuf staying behind for a little while, and she eventually nodded and slipped out the door after Eames, closing it behind her with a soft click.

“Why aren’t you going with Ariadne to grill Eames about me?” Arthur asked tiredly.

“Don’t hold it against her too much,” Yusuf said. “She’s quite young, and very sheltered compared to most of us in the business.”

“You can say that again,” Arthur said.

“She also looks up to you a great deal,” Yusuf said. “It’s a shock to her to know that her role model in the business was hurt so badly.”

“What about you?” Arthur asked.

Yusuf chuckled a little. “Arthur, I’m almost ten years older than you, and our jobs in dreamshare overlap only in the testing of and implementation of my formulas. I admire your skill as a point man, but I can categorically state that you’ve never been my role model, and I’ve never looked up to you. Or perhaps I’ve just seen enough misery in the world to prefer to sit and talk to you directly rather than ask Eames anything.”

Arthur smiled slightly. “That’s a relief.”

“I expect that Ariadne will continue to go to Eames for answers when his story about the two of you peels back more layers that you’d rather keep hidden,” Yusuf said, “And isolating yourself while she does won’t help when all these old memories get dragged up.”

“What are you saying, Yusuf?” Arthur asked, sighing.

“You’ll want someone to be there for you. Someone who won’t ask you questions you don’t want to answer. Someone who can just be a friend without judging. Now, I know I said our friendship was a manly, macho, no-talking-about-our-feelings friendship, but I’m making an exception,” Yusuf said. “What’s written between the lines of your rules is six feet high and in bright red letters. I don’t want to pry where I’m not wanted, but is this something you feel comfortable talking about with me?”

Arthur shook his head. “No. I appreciate your concern, but no.”

“I understand,” Yusuf said. “My sister-in-law never wished to talk about it either, before she put stones in her clothes and walked into the river.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Arthur said.

“No?” Yusuf said. “Forgive me for saying so, but you’ve already killed Neil. And I suspect it’s Neil who suffered what you don’t want to talk about.”

Arthur’s laugh was far too bitter to pass for amused. “Are you sure you want to be the guy I can turn to when Ariadne steals Eames away to grill him about me and all the fucked up things in my past?”

“I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t mean it,” Yusuf said.

“Well. Just remember that you offered,” Arthur said. “Let me tell you a story about Neil. Once upon a time, there was a kid named Neil. The summer he was eight, his mom, whom he loved very much, got a new boyfriend and wanted the house to herself so she could have sex without worrying about needing to look out for her kid. So she signed him up for Little League. Know what Little League is, Yusuf?”

“I’ve worked with enough Americans to know what Little League is, Arthur. Go on.”

“Okay,” Arthur said. “Neil was the best player on the team, but that wasn’t hard, since the other kids were awful. And he had the biggest goddamn crush on the coach. One day, Neil hit a triple that won the game for his team, and Coach took him out to celebrate – ‘with the team’, he told Neil’s mom. Turns out, it was just the two of them celebrating. After taking Neil to a movie of his choice and bringing him back to Coach’s place to play video games, Coach started acting a little weird. Kind of touchy and seductive.” Arthur was aware that he’d fallen into old speech patterns, that his voice had become dry and detached, like he was reciting a very dull, profanity-filled report. He couldn’t bring himself to give a shit. Just thinking about it made his emotions take a back seat. If they didn’t, he’d throw them under the wheels of the nearest bus just to escape them for a short while. There was a damn good reason he wasn’t Neil anymore.

“But Neil was just a dumbass eight year old with a crush. So he was fine with it. He was so fine with it, in fact, that he happily did everything Coach asked for and took everything he offered, and even helped Coach make things seem normal and okay for the other boys that Coach sometimes brought along. Neil believed Coach completely when he said he loved him, and when he said he was his angel. It was the best goddamn summer that stupid fucking kid had ever had. And when Coach up and disappeared from his life, well, Neil had learned an important lesson. His value as a human being was directly proportional to how much sex he was offering up. So by the time high school rolled around and Neil was fifteen, the little shit was hustling sex at a local park on the weekends. He made good money doing it, too, even if the whole process felt completely empty to him. 

“A few years later, Neil was in New York living with his best friend, still hustling, when he got picked up by the wrong john. And all his friends’ warnings about staying safe and using protection never could have come close to predicting that some random, coked-up asshole might chase him into the bathroom, beat him unconscious while he raped him, and then throw him out on the sidewalk like the trash.” He scoffed and added with no small amount of self-mockery, “Unpaid, at that, and with Christmas Eve coming the next day.”

“My God,” Yusuf choked out. He looked for a moment like he was going to reach out and pat Arthur’s back comfortingly, but Arthur’s slight headshake stopped him in his tracks. He wasn’t ready to be touched just yet.

“And the thing is, Neil knew that the only way to get the hell out of there, to stop being Neil, was to make enough money to become someone else,” Arthur said. “And he only knew how to do one job well enough for that. So he kept hustling. Even after that. And when the occasional john wanted to fuck him instead of it being the other way around, the only way he could get through it without losing his mind or attacking the guy was to just keep telling himself, ‘This is a business transaction. I need the money. It’ll be over soon.’ He’d wait ‘til the night was over and his roommate was at work before he let himself have a panic attack over it. And you know what? I’m not a hustler, haven’t been for years, so that line doesn’t work on me anymore. Because you’re right. I killed Neil. Stone dead. But I’m still carrying around all his baggage. A good shrink probably would have diagnosed me with PTSD years ago. If they’d met me back when I was Neil, they might’ve slapped me with a label of borderline sociopath because I was too busy being hollow to give a shit about other people. So. Still think Eames and I are worth it?”

Yusuf reached out again, curling his fingers around Arthur’s shoulder in a friendly, protective squeeze, and this time Arthur allowed it. “It’s my absolute pleasure to be your chemist, Arthur Scalise.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d had an older brother back then,” Arthur admits, leaning into Yusuf’s touch just the slightest bit. “Maybe my childhood wouldn’t have been so completely fucked up if I’d had one.”

“Speaking as someone with three younger sisters, I can honestly say I’m always open to the option of adding a brother to the mix,” Yusuf said.

“Thanks, Yusuf, but I think it’s too late to save me,” Arthur said.

Yusuf smiled, clapped his shoulder, and stood. “The offer remains open. Well, I’m going to go learn how to fling lumps of lead at stationary targets at high velocities. I’ll see you when Eames deems me worthy of handling my gun.”

The door closed behind Yusuf, and Arthur closed his eyes and took deep, even breaths. Slowly, ever so slowly, the emotions he’d locked away behind a vault door came seeping back like the beach: foggy wisps, cold sprays of droplets, gritty particles that rubbed him raw no matter how he adjusted and readjusted them. He allowed himself a second to acknowledge the conversation he’d just had with Yusuf, then turned his attention to the empty loft.

Somehow they’d neglected to create a living area. Not only that, but aside from the bathroom, the walls were an ugly unfinished combination of concrete and drywall.

Arthur snapped his fingers, and the rough, rolling tones of Johnny Cash filled the loft. There was no rest for the wicked, but no one said the wicked had to go without some decent music to listen to while they worked.


	6. Then, Fraud, Friends, and Phobias

Bob was dead certain that his twenty-eighth birthday would be his best, and evidence thus far proved that the world agreed with him. He’d started the day off with a lazy morning in bed, followed by Neil making him making him one of those sugary, starchy, heavy American breakfasts from scratch, which they’d eaten at the little kitchen table in their pants and little else. As he’d done for the past week, he’d tried to tease, bribe, and wheedle the answer to what his birthday present was out of his boyfriend, still with zero success. Neil had, however, let slip that by the time nine thirty rolled around, he should be completely sober, so Bob was counting that as a partial victory.

They’d separated for the rest of the day, Bob to see his mum and then to go down to the Speeler, Neil to his Krav Maga class and then to work on the boring bits of his con, surveillance or research or the like. It wasn’t a goodbye, or a see-you-later, or even a see-you-later-tonight-when-you-come-over-for-your-very-secret-present. No, it was a see-you-at-the-pub-at-seven-can’t-wait-for-you-to-meet-the-lads. It could have been terrifying, but really, it was Bob’s birthday, and he knew the rest of the Wild Bunch would like Neil just fine. He wasn’t hard to like, so long as you had the right appreciation for his humor and attitude, and Bob’s mates were exactly those kinds of people.

Bob’s mother was both lovely and a menace, as usual. He knew exactly where he got his ambitious streak, and it wasn’t from his dearly departed dad. No, he got it all from his mum. Hannah Sullivan wasn’t a social climber; at this point in her life, she’d come to the conclusion that where she was, was quite alright, actually. It was her son she worried about. Her shiftless, no-account, criminal son who could have really made something of himself before he threw over a career in law for a career in lawlessness. Again, as usual, Bob let her scold, lecture, hug, fill him in on the neighborhood gossip, and ask him about how his life was going, all without pausing for breath, with the same placid smile he always pulled out for the occasion.

“But enough of that, Bobby,” his mum said, finally winding down and pressing him into a seat in her warm, cozy kitchen. “What’s new in your life?”

“I’m a dad,” he said earnestly, and this was a part of the Sullivan mother and son ritual as well, this ‘Bobby always lies first’ game.

“Are you now?” she said dryly, plugging the kettle in and turning it on. “And how did you pull off this miracle?”

“Oh, one of One Two’s old girlfriends came storming into the Speeler last week and shoved a baby in my arms,” he said. “She said it was free to a half decent home, and as I was the only one of us who’s never been locked up, the job apparently fell to me.”

“Apparently,” his mum said. “And what’s your little bundle of joy named?”

“Well,” Bob said, biting his lip to keep from smiling and giving the game away too early, “You know that famous photograph of Churchill? The baby looks like that all the time, no matter what mood she’s in. So I’ve decided to name her Winston.”

His mum stared at him for a moment and burst into laughter. “That’s almost as bad as the one where you told me you were MI6 and you couldn’t see me ever again because you were being sent on a dangerous mission overseas.”

“I admit it,” Bob said, “I come up with half a dozen on the drive over each time I visit and only use the very best one for you.”

“I’m so touched,” his mum said as the kettle began to shriek. She turned it off and began preparing two cups of tea. “Now for the truth, Bobby-my-lad. What’s really new in your life?”

“No Sullivan sprogs,” Bob said. “But I have a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend!” his mum exclaimed delightedly, and took the seat opposite him while the tea in their cups steeped. “I thought you’d never start to settle down. Tell me about him, dear. What’s his name?”

And Bob, in a split second, considered his mother’s overwhelming desire for him to better himself, how gorgeous Neil looked in a suit, and worst of all, how much more pleased his mum would be to meet Neil’s alias than Neil himself, and went on to prove that it was possible to be both very smart and unbelievably stupid all at once. 

“His name’s Arthur,” he heard himself say, and immediately felt like kicking himself. “He’s an American.”

“Arthur the American,” his mum said. “Where in America is he from?”

“New York,” Bob said. “He came over here a few months back, and he settled in quite easily. London’s a good fit for him.”

“How did you meet?” she asked.

“Ah.” Bob coughed and looked away. “I’d just left a club, and some big, over-muscled idiots jumped me. Arthur stepped in and sent them packing.”

“Oh, Bobby,” his mum sighed. To his relief, she left it at that. “Bit of a manly man, your Arthur, I take it?”

“Not at first glance,” Bob said. He offered up another tidbit from Arthur’s fictional background. “He does have some military experience, though, and he’s got several years of martial arts training under his belt.”

“Does he know what you do for a living?” she asked, and oh, Bob had to admire that one. She’d managed to sound as if she asked out of concern and only concern, without so much of a whiff of her usual distaste whenever she brought up his work mixed in.

“He knows,” Bob said simply. It was easier than, _‘He knows, and he’s a thief, too, a bloody good one, and a con man, and I’m working with him now, and it might end up being more interesting and more dangerous than anything the Wild Bunch has ever done aside from that one time we all got chased by Chechen war criminals and nearly killed by Lenny Cole.’_

“Really?”

Bob looked down into the cup of tea his mum set in front of him. “Yeah. He did a few things that landed him on the wrong side of the law when he was in secondary school. Nothing too big, but enough for his parents to threaten to cut him off if he didn’t shape up.” Another bit of the incredibly detailed background story of Arthur Scalise. Neil’s meticulous planning didn’t seem so weird now. “Anyway, I haven’t pulled anything with One Two and Mumbles in months. It’s kind of boring, all this petty robbery and all that. I think I’m starting to move on.”

His mum smiled and leaned across the table to buss his forehead. “Happy birthday, Bobby. Welcome to the adult world.”

_‘And many happy returns, you fraud,’_ he thought as he accepted her kiss with a smile.

* * *

The pub One Two had picked out as the scene of the crime for Bob’s birthday party was nice and quiet, with few enough patrons venturing out on a cold late November weeknight that Bob, Neil, One Two, Mumbles, Cookie, and Fred were able to claim two tables in the corner as their own without any trouble.

Neil, either out of a wicked sense of perverseness or because Bob had accidentally let slip that Cookie was paranoid that he had mysterious friends in high places, straddled the line between himself and Arthur in appearance tonight, wearing one of his better shirts – no tie – and shiny, square-toed oxfords along with one of his nicer pairs of jeans and a thick wool coat. His hair wasn’t slicked back against his skull, but he’d used just enough product to make it behave less like a mop and more like a proper hairstyle. It was enough to give Cookie a turn when Neil walked in to join them at the tables they’d staked out, handsome and confident and wearing a little smirk that said he’d absolutely done it on purpose, the madman.

It was one of those rare days that One Two and Mumbles not only remembered that Bob was at least a good half dozen years younger than them, but made something of it as well. Bob watched through the gaps in his fingers and laughed in embarrassment as they both came over all awkwardly over-the-top protective and big-brotherly. Neil, to Bob’s relief, took it with good humor.

“I’d like to think Wendy and Eric would do the same if we were all out for my birthday together back in the States,” he said, “Seeing how Bob’s now officially six years older than me if we’re going by the numbers.” He toasted Bob with his one beer for the night and took a sip before continuing. “But I have a feeling they’d probably like him better than me, and call me a lucky son of a bitch. And so I am.”

“Right answer,” Mumbles said, and he clapped Neil heartily on the back. “God, I know Bob told us you were young, but how long have you actually been in our line of work? A kid like you doesn’t just pop out of nowhere with all those skills fully formed.”

“When did I start in on the stealing and the aliases and the con artist stuff, or when did I start breaking laws?” Neil asked.

“Both,” Mumbles said. “Just out of curiosity.”

“Almost three years ago for the first,” Neil said. “About seven and a half for the second.”

“You’ve been in the game a while then,” Mumbles said.

Neil nodded. “Good game, as long as nothing goes wrong.”

“Very true,” Mumbles agreed.

“I should go make sure your friend Cookie doesn’t think I’m friends with the devil or whatever it is that’s got him watching me so close,” Neil said, standing up.

Bob looked over to the next table. Cookie, deep in conversation with Fred, was indeed watching Neil like a hawk.

“You can’t go,” One Two protested. “We haven’t asked you about your designs on Bob’s virtue yet.”

“Bob doesn’t have any virtue to protect,” Mumbles said. “If anything, it’s Neil’s virtue we should worry about. He’s practically a kid.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Neil said casually. “All my virtue’s long gone. But whatever virtue Bob’s got left is in safe hands.”

Bob was once again reduced to embarrassed laughter as Neil strolled away to sit at Fred and Cookie’s table while Mumbles chuckled and One Two sputtered.

“He’s a keeper, Handsome,” Mumbles said. “You found yourself a good one. Don’t either of you fuck it up.”

“’M not planning on it,” Bob said. “But I guess we’ll see how strong our relationship is when he finds out I told my mum I was dating his alias.”

“I need another drink,” One Two said. “A big one. You’re lucky it’s your birthday, Bob. I’m not even gonna ask. I’m just gonna sit, and drink, and commiserate, and call you an idiot in the privacy of my own head.”

Mumbles’ chuckle became an outright laugh. “Make that two beers, Mister One Two. You can sympathize, I’ll make him laugh, and we’ll both call him idiots in our heads.”

Bob hid his face behind his hands again. He had great friends, he really did, but sometimes, he just wanted to kill them.

“I’m not saying that what we had back then was Utopia, Christ no,” Cookie was saying vehemently as Bob wandered over a while later, leaving One Two to his drinking and Mumbles to his minding.

Fred nodded at whatever point Cookie was making, as did Neil. Apparently Cookie had warmed right up to Neil after a few minutes, and the two of them and Fred were – Bob cringed at the horrible inadvertent but inevitable idiom – thick as thieves. He sat beside Neil quietly and waited for the conversation to start to make sense to him.

“No, but I get what you’re saying,” Neil said. “You think of a generation, you think twenty-five years. Crime, try twenty-five months, if that. It’s moving fast, and for every new way cops figure out how to catch criminals, people on the other side of the fence figure out another five ways to avoid getting caught. I admit, with what I do, that’s fucking useful. But there are some types of criminal – some types of crime – that I wish would stay in the fucking Stone Age.”

“Exactly,” Cookie said. “Human traffickers, for example. Wretched creatures.”

“Counterfeiters,” Fred offered up. He waved a placating hand at Neil and clarified, “Not things like your false identification and bank cards and credit cards and all the little bits that go into authenticating your alias. I’m talking about money. Speaking as someone who likes his money to be actual money and not a waste of paper printed up somewhere in Asia, and his government to not be on shaky ground, I dislike counterfeit notes on more than just general principle.”

“Hear, hear,” Neil murmured, toasting Fred with the bottle of pop he’d switched to a while back. “This isn’t a comment on you, Cookie, but drug dealers. Some of them. Back in New York, in the neighborhood I was living in, there was a guy who pretty much ran the local drug scene. I mean really local, our neighborhood and a couple of others, plus the nearby park and bodega, but still, he had a lock on it. And nobody ever caught him with anything, even though everyone knew he was the guy you went to if you wanted to score. Even the cops knew. They’d stop him and shake him down, and they never found shit on him. But that’s because that fucker was canny. He used the only people who nobody would ever suspect to move his product, to carry it from its pickup point to delivery site.”

“Kids,” Bob guessed. Neil nodded.

“Kids,” Neil said, disgusted.

“There’s someone like that here,” Cookie told them, managing to sound even more disgusted than Neil. “Bastard has kids on one of the council estates run his deliveries for one pound tips. He only uses the ones who are old enough to keep a secret, but young enough, and poor enough, to get excited over the prospect of a pound in their pocket.”

Neil grimaced. “So, hypothetically speaking, if this piece of shit suddenly disappeared one day, what would the fallout look like?”

Cookie gave him a long, evaluating look before saying, “He has a few people working for him, and a lot of competition for his piece of the pie. It would look like a very ugly power vacuum, and there’s no telling if someone as bad or worse would end up winning the tussle. Best not to stick your nose in unless you have a foolproof plan.”

“There’s no such thing as a foolproof plan,” Neil said. “Every time you think you’ve come up with one, some fool’s gonna prove you wrong.”

Fred laughed appreciatively. “Wise for your age, aren’t you?”

“I’ve always been precocious,” Neil said with a shrug and a grin.

Conversation flowed easily around their table, the four of them sharing their tales of their greatest successes as well as their most humiliating failures. Neil even opened up enough to share a bit about his mysterious friend Wendy, the tattoo artist back in New York.

“We haven’t gone this long without seeing each other since we were kids,” Neil said. “She’s like my soulmate or something. We always figured if I was straight we probably would have had one of those crazy high school romances and ended up parents before graduating. But she’s like – if you got to choose your family, I’d pick her for mine, you know? She’s always been there for me. I can always count on her, even now, when we’re thousands of miles apart.” His fingertips drew lazy figures on Bob’s leg beneath the table.

“I’m glad she’s not competition,” Bob said. “I don’t think I could beat that.”

“No competition,” Neil said. “Not unless she suddenly grows a dick and changes her name to Wendell.”

“And as long as I don’t do the opposite –”

“You don’t have anything to worry about, period,” Neil said. “But then again, that Eames guy I’m working with is pretty fucking hot.” Cookie and Fred laughed quietly.

_‘Now would be a good time to tell him about my mum,’_ Bob thought. He opened his mouth to do so and stopped abruptly when he heard it.

It. The loud, particularly thick Weegie accent that indicated a One Two who was either stunningly angry or drunk enough that common sense had left the building. And he didn’t sound angry. If anything, he sounded insistently earnest.

“I’m just sayin’, it’s obvious,” One Two said loudly.

“And I’m saying it’s not your business,” Mumbles cautioned him.

“Course it’s our business,” One Two contradicted Mumbles. “Bob’s our business, ain’t he? And it’s his masculinity at stake.”

Mumbles made an indistinct grumbling sound. The fingers drawing on Bob’s leg stilled.

“I like Neil,” One Two said. “He’s a smart one. Can handle himself in a fight. But Bob did right choosin’ him, yeah? He’s younger, see, and a wee bit smaller.”

Neil’s fingers dug into Bob’s thigh as their table listened in silence.

“That’s it?” Mumbles said incredulously. “Those are your brilliant fucking reasons for why Bob’s fucking him and not the other way around?”

“Not all of ‘em,” One Two said. “There’s one you can’t argue with.”

“And what’s that?”

“Our Bob would never bend over for anyone,” One Two said triumphantly. “He’s more man than that.”

Bob looked over at Neil as his boyfriend snatched his hand back as if it had been burned. An expression crossed his face too fast for Bob to catch – anger? embarrassment? – before it went frighteningly blank.

“Excuse me,” Neil said, perfectly polite, standing up from the table and gathering up his coat. “I’m going outside to have a smoke.”

“You don’t smoke,” Bob said inanely, and immediately wished he could take it back and say something better.

“Not usually,” Neil agreed, still blank and unreadable and polite. “I’m sure I’ll find someone I can bum a cigarette and a light off of.” He slipped away and out the door before Eames could try again.

Cookie watched him go, looking unusually serious and worried. “Stay here a moment, Bob, will you,” he said distractedly, getting up as well.

To Bob’s surprise, he didn’t follow Neil. He went to the table next to theirs and stooped over, his head disappearing between Mumbles’ and One Two’s as he spoke to them, his voice too low for Bob to hear what he said. Whatever it was, though, it was enough to rattle them both, and One Two blanched. Bob was surprised by how viciously pleased he was by the sight. Cookie straightened, grim and satisfied, and walked back over to Bob.

“See to One Two, Handsome, before word reaches the wrong ears and someone else does it instead,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go offer your boyfriend a fag and some company before he writes us all off.”

Bob watched him leave just as he had Neil, and slowly turned back to meet Fred’s eyes. Fred looked sympathetic, but not overly so, and he raised his eyebrows and silently tilted his head in One Two’s direction. Bob nodded, pushed his chair back, and forced himself to stand and walk the few feet between their tables. With each step he found himself growing angrier and angrier, until, by the time he pulled out the seat on Mumbles’ other side and sat down in it heavily, he was ready to cheerfully strangle One Two, best mate or not. The sight of Neil wiped clean of any sign of emotion just to hide whatever was really underneath that blank mask made Bob ache, and he wanted to rip apart the reason for that change.

He glared darkly at One Two in complete silence until his friend started to fidget uncomfortably under his eyes.

“Bob,” One Two started weakly.

“Shut it,” Bob snapped. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping it might calm him down some. It didn’t do a thing for him. “We don’t,” he bit out.

One Two managed to show a bit of good sense and stayed quiet. Mumbles asked the obvious question.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t fuck. Go on,” he said. “Ask why. As long as One Two can keep his fucking trap shut about this, Neil will forgive me for explaining.”

Mumbles nodded, shooting a warning look at One Two. “Alright. Why not?”

Bob growled. “Because my boyfriend – my gorgeous, brilliant, dangerous, talented, fantastic fucking boyfriend – was raped by some no-account bastard some time ago, and now, him getting fucked is completely out of the question. He likes to pretend he doesn’t know what it’s called, but I looked it up. It’s called a PTSD trigger. I don’t think giving him fucking flashbacks is worth talking him into giving it a try with me. So no, no one’s getting fucked. But you know what, One Two?” he said. “Sometimes I think, maybe, just maybe, I’d let him do me. I’ve thought about it a few times. Not often, and not for very long, but I’ve thought about it. But I always decide not to. Know why? Because I’m a fucking coward. I’m not brave enough to let go of my stupid fucking macho pride. I think maybe I’m just not _man enough_ for it.”

He bared his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “So thank you, One Two, for the epiphany. I think I’m gonna give it some real consideration now. You know, just so I can be enough of a man for my boyfriend.”

Bob stood and looked down at a thoroughly penitent One Two and a calmly understanding Mumbles. _‘Thank fuck for Mumbles. He’ll make sure One Two doesn’t go do something stupid just because I’m hacked off at him.’_ “Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a great party, but I have to go apologize to my boyfriend and convince him that my best mate isn’t actually as big a wanker as he acted tonight. Goodnight.”

No one called him back as he walked away, but when he cut his eyes over to Fred, Fred mimed a genteel clap and winked. The angry, oppressive weight pressing down on Bob lifted a little at the sight. 

The sound of familiar voices brought Bob to a stop just outside the pub, and he huddled against the building, turning up his collar against the cold and tucking his hands in his coat pockets as he listened.

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Cookie said. “One Two just –”

“Just buys into tired, flawed stereotypes and treats them like they’re Gospel truth,” Neil filled in, and fucking hell, the accent was Neil, but the words, the cadence, all the rest of it was pure Arthur. “I get it. I know he didn’t mean to offend anyone. I’m not even all that mad at him anymore. Well, not murderously so. It’s just interesting to finally have an answer to where it comes from.”

“It?” Cookie asked.

Neil sighed, and his answer came almost reluctantly. “Bob’s internalized homophobia about how getting fucked apparently makes you less of a man or some idiocy along those lines.”

The words sat between Neil, Cookie, and the eavesdropping Bob like a heavy stone. When Cookie responded, Bob wasn’t surprised he changed the subject.

“You know he’s mad about you, don’t you?” Cookie said. “Most of us have known he’s a poof for years and never met any of his boyfriends. He came all the way out early this past summer and still didn’t even mention any names. Now you’re here at his birthday party with his best mates, and you met him a month and a half ago. I mean it, Neil, he’s completely mad for you.”

“I know,” Neil said quietly. “I feel the same. That’s why I’m letting him work through all of this on his own time instead of calling him out on it. Or I would, if he wasn’t a few feet away listening in.”

That was his cue, Bob decided, and walked around the corner. Neil and Cookie were lounging against the wall side by side, their hands and faces lit by the cherry red coal at the ends of their half-smoked fags. They looked up in unison at his approach, and all words, all excuses and apologies and consolations and jokes at One Two’s expense and basic questions about Neil’s wellbeing, flew from his head and left him speechless. He tried for a smile instead. Neil smiled back. It was faint – tiny, even – but it was still a smile. And that counted for everything.

“I said thanks for the party, but that I had to go convince my boyfriend that my best friend isn’t really an enormous wanker,” Bob said. “That, and apologize.”

“You weren’t the one saying it, so please don’t apologize for him,” Neil said. “And I’m really not in the mood to hear that One Two isn’t an enormous wanker. I know he’s not. I just – I want to leave him in the pub and forget about him for the rest of the night, okay?”

“That’s a great idea,” Bob said. “We going back to yours still?”

“That’s where your present is,” Neil said.

Bob grinned in relief. Neil hadn’t told him to just drop him off. “I can’t wait.”

Cookie dropped his fag to the sidewalk and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. “Off you go, then, boys. I think Fred and I can keep the birthday party going without you.”

“Thanks, Cookie,” Neil said.

“Don’t thank me, just go end the night on a good note,” Cookie said. He planted a hand on Bob’s back and gave him a light shove in the direction of his parked car. “Go on.”

Bob waved a goodbye over his shoulder, and Neil fell into step with him. They walked to the car, got in, and started to head to Neil’s flat, all completely wordlessly. Bob made it six blocks before attempting to breach the silence between them.

“Neil…”

“I’m not mad at you,” Neil said calmly. “Alright? I’m frustrated, but it’s not you I’m frustrated with.”

“Really,” Bob said. “And that’s why you’ve come over all Arthur-ish.”

“You don’t really want me swearing a blue streak, do you?” Neil asked.

“If it meant I got a genuine show of feeling from you, I’d take it.”

“Forgive me for needing to step back and get a little objectivity tonight,” Neil said. He sighed. “Fine. What One Two said pissed me off. But he’s not important to me. You are. That’s why it got under my skin. I would’ve shrugged it off, except we had that conversation after the first time you came with me to a party as Eames.”

“Conversation?” Bob asked, puzzled.

“Of course you don’t remember it,” Neil said, half to himself. “You were practically asleep.”

“What did I say?”

“I asked if you’d considered letting me top,” Neil said. He paused for a moment and said the next part slowly and very clearly. “You said you were gay, but you weren’t that gay. Or at least, not that kind of gay.”

“…That’s really fucking embarrassing,” Bob said as soon as he’d recovered from the shock of hearing his own words repeated back to him. “I’d say I’m surprised, but. Um. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry,” Neil said. “I want you to straighten your shit out. You’re hurting yourself like this, you know?”

Bob didn’t, not really, but he did know – or at least he did now – what it was doing to him and Neil. “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t happy with the way things were? I could’ve done something different.”

Neil pinched the area above the bridge of his nose and breathed in deeply – an Arthur gesture of irritation Bob had seen more than once at dinners and parties and art museum openings. “Bob.”

“Yes?”

“Do I strike you in any way as a pushover?”

“Ah – no, no you don’t.”

“Then believe me when I say that if our relationship stops making me ridiculously happy, I’ll tell you.”

“Okay.” Bob nodded in agreement. He should have left it there, honestly, but he had to check – “But you do want to fuck me.”

Neil’s faint smile from outside the pub made a reappearance. “You’re not wrong. _But_. I don’t want you just grudgingly going along with it. I want consent on the ‘hell yes’ level of enthusiasm. Basically, you just sort out the shit in your head, and we keep doing what we’re doing, because that’s all been great. Okay?”

“It’s a deal.”

“Good.” His smile blossomed, and the dimples Bob was crazy for finally showed up again. “Now can we please stop talking about our feelings?”

“God, yes.”

The rest of the short drive was silent, but Bob didn’t feel any need to fill it with words. This time, he had Neil’s hand on his leg again, his fingertips drawing strange and fantastic figures into the fabric of his jeans.


	7. Then, An Entirely New Experience

“What’s that?” Bob asked blankly, looking down at the closed steel briefcase next to Neil on the mattress.

“Your birthday present,” Neil said. He tipped Bob backward gently so he was lying on the bed. “Fifteen minutes of using it is your birthday present.”

Bob popped right back into a seated position to scrutinize the case. “Is it drugs? ‘Cause I don’t do anything if I don’t know what it is first.”

“It’s not drugs, it’s a PASIV Device,” Neil said as he manipulated the locks and cracked the briefcase open. “There’s a chemical component, but it’s not a drug. At least, it’s not something you can get physically addicted to. It’s –”

“It’s bloody insane,” Bob whispered at his first good look inside the case. Little canisters of liquid, spools of tubing, IV needles, a digital clock, buttons…. “Where did you get this?”

“I took it from a guy who was blackout drunk and bragging about being very, very important to a classified US military project,” Neil said, smirking. “He really should’ve been more careful about who he propositioned and took back up to his hotel room from the bar next door.”

“Forget the case, _you’re_ insane,” Bob said, laughing. “Is that why you’re here? The military’s out looking for you?”

“No. Like I said, blackout drunk,” Neil said smugly. “And I’m good at avoiding security cameras. Idiot has no idea how he lost a very expensive and classified piece of military property. I’ll tell you the full story after your present, I promise. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

Bob gave the ‘expensive and classified piece of military property’ a wary look. “Is it safe?”

“I have the manual memorized, I’ve been building the level since the day after we met, it’s small and stable, it’s a short dose, I’m like ninety-nine point nine percent sure I’ve cleared out any potential for projections – yeah, it’s safe. Trust me.”

“I do, you know I do, but you’re gonna have to explain some of that to me,” Bob said. “It went straight over my head.”

“Right, yeah.” Neil tapped one of the canisters. “This is a brand new technology. Dreamshare. You’ve heard of lucid dreaming, where you know you’re not awake? It’s like that, but way more realistic. And when you wake up, you remember everything. A level is the dream you go into. You’ve got your subject, and your dreamer. The dreamer builds the world; the subject comes along for the ride and fills it with their subconscious. Projections are part of the subject’s subconscious. They look like people, act like people, so on and so forth. To keep things simple I made a level where your subconscious would see anyone else as intruding, so you should keep your projections out on your own.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“I told you ahead of time about how this works, so the level will stay stable as long as you don’t completely lose your shit,” Neil said. “Time runs faster when you’re dreaming than when you’re awake, so fifteen minutes on the clock gives you three hours under. And if you die in a dream, you just wake up, but you can still feel everything else just like normal. Bad stuff, good stuff, in between stuff, anything. Got it?”

“Got it.” Bob said. “Er, I’m not going to die in this one, right?”

“You’d have to try really hard to die in the dream I put together for you,” Neil said. “Come on. Lie back, relax, and let me give you your birthday present.”

This time, when Neil pushed him flat, Bob stayed down, obediently offering up his arm when Neil held up one of the slender, hollow needles. Neil slid it into one of the veins in his wrist almost painlessly, taping it in place and brushing a feather-light kiss over the spot where needle met skin once he was done. Then he reached back into the case and pulled out a second IV needle and line and hooked himself into the device with the same slightly unnerving competency that he had used with Bob.

“You’re using it, too?” Bob asked as Neil programmed in fifteen minutes on the countdown clock.

“No dreamer, no dream,” Neil said. He switched on the space heater propped up just above the head of the bed, lay down with his finger on the big glowing center button, and smiled secretively at Bob. “Sleep tight.”

And Bob went elsewhere.

Turquoise. His first impression was turquoise as far as the eye could see, slowly fading into a deeper blue the farther away from him it went. He held up his hand to shade his eyes against the bright early afternoon sun. It was water, the ocean – someplace tropical, most likely. He wiggled his toes and felt fine grains of sand rub between them. He looked down and admired the clean white color of it, soft and sun-heated beneath his feet. The air was warm. _He_ was warm, especially where the sun shone down on his shoulders and the top of his head. It was a pleasant sensation.

He looked down again, this time to see what else he was wearing besides no shoes or socks. Neil had dreamed him into a soft, thin t-shirt and a pair of comfortable old shorts, perfect beachwear. “So what did you dream up for me, then?” he asked as he took in the clear sky and vibrant water. “My own private beach?”

No one answered. That wasn’t a surprise. He’d been told he’d have the dream to himself. “I s’pose I’ll have to find out on my own.” He turned about to see what lay behind him. In the middle distance, dense, tangled tropical trees and vines grew together, winding into and around each other so snugly there was no way for anyone to wander through. He kept turning, and saw more beach off to the side, subtly curving in like a picture frame containing the wild greenery in the middle. In the other direction, the beach made the same curve.

“What sort of birthday present do you give a man who creates a private island just for you?” Bob wondered aloud. It would have to be something bloody impressive to come even close to matching this, that was certain. Christ, and Neil said _he_ was a lucky son of a bitch.

Bob set his back against the sun and slowly started to walk along the edge of the beach where the water lapped at the shore in tiny, lazy waves. His feet left perfect imprints behind him in the damp sand as he set off to find out what else awaited him on the island.

An island. A beautiful, completely realistic to every one of Bob’s senses, stunningly detailed island. And Neil had started working on it the day after they met, just because Bob had made an offhand comment about wanting something he’d never done before for his birthday.

Neil’s specialty was being something of an arsehole – ‘recovering asshole,’ as Neil put it – but Bob was beginning to suspect that either that was a complete load of bollocks, or he was as much of one as his boyfriend and just hadn’t noticed until now.

Seeing as Neil really was a bit of an arsehole, recovering or not, it looked like there was a strong case for the latter being true.

When he woke up, he’d have to ask Neil more about how this dream thing worked. He was – and this was the part he was clear on – inside Neil’s _head_ , of all places, and if that wasn’t a breathtaking display of, of trust, or something, than he didn’t know what was, but he was fuzzy on the _how_ part of it all. He was certain Neil had a manual with all sorts of explanations for all of it back in the flat, where Bob was sleeping, but that wasn’t really the how he wanted an answer to.

How could this peaceful little island, with its clean, sparkling sand and almost too blue to be real water, be a part of Neil’s mind? Bob would have expected Neil to have created something grittier, seedier, seamier, a place that, urban or small town or rural piece of nowhere, didn’t flinch away from the ugliness of humanity that most people were so practiced at ignoring and pretending didn’t exist. No one would ever have to lift up London’s carpet to show Neil its dirty, corrupt underbelly. He already saw it clearly.

It didn’t fit with Neil’s Arthur persona, either. That part of Neil would favor state of the art high-rise office buildings and hotels, all of them in gleaming glass and stainless steel. It would be beautiful, but it would be only inviting on the surface, hard and sharp, a carefully concealed threat at every turn: _I’m gorgeous, I’m intelligent, I’m sophisticated, and if you get any closer, you’ll lose that hand, and I’ll still be smiling when you pull back a stump._ Classic Arthur, as Bob was coming to know him.

“It’s really no wonder you want me to partner with you on your con,” Bob said, kicking up a little spray of water as he kept walking along. “You’re not much of a people person no matter whose name you’re wearing.” Not that that was a problem. Patrick Eames was even better with people than Bob was.

Then again, the wankers Eames and Arthur always dealt with didn’t look down on him like they would if he showed up to their dos as Bob. 

Right. The island. Not a Neil thing. Not an Arthur thing. He supposed it followed that Neil had gone against type and made him something that wasn’t Neil-ish or Arthur-ish at all, just because he figured Bob would like it. Maybe that was why it sounded like Neil was saying earlier that he’d only just finished putting the “finishing touches” on the dream. Six weeks was a long time to work on building something Neil said was “small and stable”. Was it? Maybe it was a really short time. Like hell if he knew. He knew very few things for certain right now, but what he knew, he knew for a fact.

It was his twenty-eighth birthday today.

He was asleep on Neil’s bed, and walking along the shoreline of a tropical island at the same time.

The island was inside Neil’s head.

He’d made it twenty-eight years without anyone pointing out that he could be an arsehole.

Those were the facts of Robert Sullivan, in a nutshell.

He doubted he was supposed to ponder what an utter arse he’d been unintentionally being while he was down here, surrounded by such still and serene beauty, but the quiet helped him think. London was a drumbeat that throbbed in his head and pulsed through his veins, all hurry and rush, no time to sit and have a quiet think. If he had to use his fifteen minutes – his three hours, whatever – of a private island getaway to at least jumpstart the process of sorting out “the shit in his head,” to quote Neil, then he’d gladly do it.

“Alright, boyo,” he told himself. “Time to put that education to work and do some serious thinking.”

It wasn’t One Two’s fault; he knew that much, no matter what Neil had said to Cookie. One Two just happened to buy into the same line of thought that everyone else on their side of the street did, and had a belly full of beer and a pair of loose lips at the wrong time. Bob wasn’t given a handbook on how to be gay and a criminal in the East End when he dropped out of law school and started hanging about with Mumbles and One Two. These were just things that everyone knew, and Bob, because Bob wanted to always land on his feet, soon knew these things, too.

Maybe the things that everyone just knew here in London weren’t things that everyone knew back in New York, but Bob had his doubts. They seemed like universal things – and if they weren’t universal, then they were at least something common to their sort of crime in western civilization. No, it wasn’t that the rules were different in New York City. It was that Neil didn’t give a damn about the rules.

For a brief, uncharitable moment, he thought that it must be a great deal easier to not give a damn when it wasn’t Neil’s own arse – and reputation, by extension – on the line. Then rational thought returned, along with Neil’s reasons, and Bob –

“Congratulations, you wanker,” he said. “You’re an even bigger shit than you thought.”

Never mind. He’d do something nice for Neil. Maybe when they woke up. Maybe over the weekend. Whenever he did, he wasn’t going to let on exactly what sort of internal thought process was behind the gesture.

Now, Neil said he was perfectly happy keeping on with what they were doing, and seemed entirely sincere in saying so. Sure, he said he’d like to give a certain something else involving his cock and Bob’s arse a go, but he made such a point about consent – _‘enthusiastic consent,’_ his memory reminded him – that as long as Bob never brought it up again, he was probably off scot-free. Even thinking about ducking the matter felt a little like cheating, though, so he wasn’t going to do Neil like that. Didn’t he already tell One Two that he’d give it serious consideration? So he could…be…man…enough….

“Well, fuck me,” Bob said dazedly as the reason for Neil’s frustration smacked him right between the eyes. “Fuck. Bloody fucking buggering fuck. Bob, you’ve really stepped in it this time.” He picked up the pace unconsciously out of agitation.

He’d been going about thinking about it entirely the wrong way. If he bought into the idea that if you’re hard enough, if you’re a man, if you’re strong and intimidating and tough and not just playing at being a criminal, then you do the fucking, otherwise that might all change, or word could get out, and all your hard earned reputation on the street would be worth shit – if he bought into that, what did the flip side look like to Neil? Neil, who was all that, all that and more, knew right from the first few minutes of meeting Bob that he went on the pull looking for men wanting to get fucked. He’d further assumed – rightly – that Bob had assumed – wrongly – that if there was any fucking to be done in the bedroom, Bob was going to be the one doing the fucking.

And if what had happened to Neil hadn’t happened, and Neil had still ended up in London, and they’d still ended up meeting that night, and they’d still gotten together, Neil would probably still want to fuck him, but Bob knew, he just _knew_ , that Neil would have happily let things go the other way around. And if Bob knew it, Neil knew it, and that meant they were both thinking about the very obvious question that followed Bob’s half-asleep pronouncement and One Two’s drunken declaration: If that was what Bob thought about himself in that position, then what the hell did he think of Neil?

“Hey!” Neil called from farther inland. “Where are you going so fast?”

Bob skidded to a halt and looked around wildly before spotting a small thatched cabana set a fair ways up on the beach, safely away from the high tide mark. Lounging in the shade on a rattan couch with puffy navy blue cushions, book in hand, was Neil. No, Arthur. No. Neil. He blinked hard and started trudging up the dry sand to where NeilArthur sat, his white collared shirt rolled up to the elbows, several buttons undone, bare feet peeking out from the hems of his oldest, softest pair of denim jeans, hair looking just like it had at the pub before they’d headed back to Neil’s flat.

How odd. He thought Neil had said he’d got rid of the possibility of any projections showing up, but then, he’d couched that in terms of people Bob would consider intruding. Neil was most definitely not an intruder. And really, after thinking about him that long and that hard, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to him that his subconscious decided to project his boyfriend into his island escape.

“Just thinking,” he told NeilArthur, taking a seat beside him on the couch. He peered closely into his eyes and leaned back, startled. “Did you know you’ve got a big dark brown spot right below your pupils on both eyes? Who are you right now? ‘Cause I’m calling you NeilArthur in my head, but it’s a bit of a mouthful, and honestly, it just makes it more confusing.”

“Oh,” NeilArthur said. He sounded just as surprised as Bob. “Uh, Neil, I guess. So. Like the island?”

“It’s perfect,” Bob said. “Absolutely perfect.”

“Then why the serious face?” his projection asked him. “This is supposed to be a relaxing getaway.”

Bob slouched deep into the cushions, leaning against Neil. “Just thinking, is all. Things on my mind. It’s nice and quiet here. Good thinking spot, this island.”

“Quietest place in the entire city to read outside a library,” Neil said, holding up his book. It was one on body language that Bob vaguely remembered seeing on Neil’s bookshelf back in the flat. It made sense that he’d imagine Neil reading one of his own books. It seemed more natural.

“What are you thinking about?” Neil asked, ever so casually.

Bob shrugged again, pushing him further into Neil. “You should know, shouldn’t you?”

“I could guess, but I think I’d like it better if you told me,” Neil said.

Christ, even his projection of Neil was true to life.

“You, me.” Bob shrugged again. “Sex.”

“You don’t have to sort that all out now, you know,” Neil said. “You could think about the snorkel equipment here instead. There are a lot of fish in the ocean. We could go swimming until your time is up.”

“But I’ve already sorted most of it out, I think,” Bob said.

Neil blinked at him with his odd, bi-colored eyes. “That was fast.”

“I had strong motivation.”

Neil smiled at him, slow and warm. “I like the sound of that,” he said.

“We’re worth it,” Bob said honestly. It didn’t feel nearly as awkward being so candid with his own subconscious as it would’ve been if he’d been talking to the real Neil. “I – can I talk to you about it? Before I wake up and talk to the real you?”

“The real me?” Neil echoed.

“Yeah,” Bob said. “You know, like a practice run, while I still have it all mostly straight in my head.”

“The real me,” Neil said again, flatly. “Bob…”

“Sure, you’re real down here,” Bob said, “But the real you explained it to me. About projections. And having the dream to myself.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Neil muttered. “Bob, seriously, I’m really Neil.”

“Can I please just do a practice apology with my own subconscious without my projection of my boyfriend arguing about it with me?” Bob asked in exasperation.

Neil looked like he was about to laugh. “And then you’ll listen to me?”

“And then I’ll listen to myself,” Bob said.

“Close enough,” Neil said. “Okay. Shoot.”

“Good,” Bob said. “Good. Alright.” He stared down at his hands as he knotted and unknotted his fingers, wondering exactly where to begin.

Neil sighed and tugged him all the way over so that Bob’s head was in his lap. “If you’re gonna take your time about it, you might as well get comfortable,” he said at Bob’s startled yelp, his clever fingers creeping up the back of Bob’s neck and his short hair in a light massage.

“I don’t think like that about you,” Bob blurted.

The massage stopped for a second, then continued again as Bob saw Neil nod above him from the corner of his eye. “Okay.”

“I mean it,” Bob said. “I’ve never – it’s never been like that, not even for a second. I think you’re amazing, and so fucking smart, and not a little scary when you want to be, and I respect you so much, and I know it’s too soon to be saying things like this, but I’m half in love with you already, and I’ve never, ever thought you were anything less than equal to me. The trouble’s just been me. You never really entered into the equation, you know?”

“I didn’t, but that’s good to know,” Neil said. “I feel like that about you, too. The love part, I mean.”

“I hope so,” Bob sighed, relaxing completely into the cushions and Neil’s lap. “It’s just, when you’re the kind of crook I am, doing the sort of work I do, with the sort of friends and acquaintances and enemies I have, sometimes your reputation’s all you have to fall back on in a tight spot. Especially when you’re like me. You ought to know this. Folk like us have to work twice as hard to prove their worth once people know they’re gay.”

“Cookie wouldn’t give a fuck,” Neil said softly. “Fred wouldn’t either. Besides, who says what goes on in our beds has to be public knowledge?”

“Mumbles couldn’t care less, while we’re naming names,” Bob said. “And once One Two sobers up, he won’t give a toss.”

“Really,” Neil said skeptically.

“Yeah,” Bob said. “He’s just…. It’s not an uncommon view, you know? Believe me; he feels like absolute shit that he said what he did. He’ll probably spend the next month or two trying to make it up to you without ever telling you he’s sorry.”

“Not big on apologies?”

“He knows, and we know, that actions count for more than words where he’s concerned,” Bob said. “But you’re right. And that’s something I was thinking. It’s not really anyone’s business but ours, is it?”

“Nope,” Neil said.

Bob waited for his subconscious to provide a bit more, to say something intelligent and insightful in Neil’s voice. When his projection of Neil didn’t speak any further, Bob reached out and felt his hand immediately grasped by Neil’s. Christ, he was glad he was trying this out on his own subconscious first. He’d reached one of the more difficult bits.

“I’ve never done it before,” he admitted. “There was a boyfriend back in university I was getting close to, and I might’ve with him if things had been different, but I dropped out and we lost touch, and then I learned about all those unwritten rules for how to be a poof and a thief all at the same time.”

“Never?” Neil asked. His fingernails scratched lightly against Bob’s scalp through his bristly hair, and Bob arched his head into the touch almost eagerly. Neil laughed, low and amused, and applied his nails a bit harder.

“Never. Didn’t let myself think about it after,” Bob said. “Not till you.”

“Why not until me?”

“’Cause – ‘cause you’re you,” Bob said. It made perfect sense to him, but of course his projection of his boyfriend acted the part just like he would in the waking world. That meant explanations. “You’re – I can trust you. I do trust you. You already know I’m crazy for you. You’re everything I could ever hope for. You’re strong enough to take my weight when I need to lean on you, and I don’t just mean that literally, and you let me be your shoulder to lean on when you need one, too. ‘Cause dismissing it’s habit, now, but when I think about it with you it’s not something I want to run away from. It’s not scary. It’s – I don’t know what it is, but it’s not bad.”

“Let me give it a shot,” Neil said. Bob nodded, and he said, “You think about it, and your stomach goes all weird on you. Not like a pit, but like maybe you have butterflies. Big butterflies, all flapping around in there trying to stretch their wings.”

“Yes,” Bob said.

“And your pulse goes up real high. You can almost feel your heart beating in your chest,” Neil said. “It’s not that you’re scared, it’s that you’re kinda looking forward to it and you’re not sure why, and that makes your pulse go even faster.”

Bob just nodded wordlessly.

“Anticipation,” Neil said. “Anticipation, and nervousness. You want to, but you’re freaked out that you want to, which stresses you out but doesn’t make you want to any less. It just makes you want to think about something else, anything else, as fast as possible. Am I right?”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “But I think I’m done trying to think about other things just to avoid a little nervous anticipation.”

“That’s good to hear, but you can slow down right there,” Neil said. “We’re not throwing you in the deep end just because you figured yourself out. Slow and steady, got it?”

Bob was secretly relieved to hear it, but he asked anyway. “Why not?”

“If you’ve been waiting this long to let someone in you, you can be damn sure I’m gonna make it something you love when we actually do it,” Neil said. “You and me, we’re gonna take our time about it. Right now you’re too stressed. If we jumped right in and did it when the dream ends, you’d be really fucking uncomfortable until maybe halfway through it because you’re all tensed up and anxious, and you’d be sore as hell in the morning because of it. No. I’ll tell you what. When this is over, I’m giving you a blow job, and we’ll see how you like being touched down there. Just touched. Ever let anyone do that?”

His conversation with his own subconscious had taken a turn for the odd, Bob thought. “No, never,” Bob answered, shivering unconsciously at the seductive promise in Neil’s voice.

Neil smiled down at him. “I think you’ll like it. It’s a sensitive place. If you don’t, just tell me, and we’ll call the whole experiment off and keep on doing what we’ve been doing, okay? The important thing is that we’re both okay with it.”

Bob closed his eyes and laughed weakly as a strong suspicion for why his extremely lifelike projection of Neil had become even more lifelike floated up to the surface of his mind from the very start of the conversation. “Oh, God. You said you wanted me to listen to you?”

“Are you sure you aren’t listening to yourself?” Neil asked teasingly.

“Neil, come on.”

“I think I underemphasized the ‘share’ part of the whole ‘dreamshare’ tech thing,” Neil said. “Like I said up top, you can’t have a dream without a dreamer. The dreamer always goes under, too.”

Bob was silently, excruciatingly embarrassed for the span of several heartbeats. Then Neil squeezed the hand he was holding and continued his lazy head massage, and it was as if all of Bob’s muscles unclenched at once.

“Guess I didn’t need the practice round, did I?”

“Not really,” Neil said. There was a smile in his voice, but all hints of teasing were gone.

“I really do think I love you,” Bob said, opening his eyes and looking up at Neil.

Neil looked away, his cheeks reddening slightly as he gave Bob’s knees a small, pleased smile. “Me, too. I mean. The love thing. Like I said.” He cleared his throat and said hurriedly, “You want to try out the snorkel equipment? I put a lot of cool fish in the water right in front of the cabana.”

“No,” Bob said. He stretched a bit on the couch and settled in with a sigh of satisfaction, shifting his head a bit until he’d found the exact right spot on Neil’s thigh to use as a pillow. “I’m doing just fine right here.”

“I guess the fish can wait,” Neil said. He didn’t sound very put out about it. Not even a little bit, actually.

“Fish can always wait when there’s a couch and a boyfriend,” Bob said. He grinned up at Neil, and when the butterflies rose, he embraced them. “You serious about that blowjob?”

“Very serious,” Neil assured him, grinning back.

“Then I guess you should tell me a bit more about this PASIV thing and what the con’s really about before I’m sex-stupid and can’t focus on details,” Bob suggested.

“Well,” Neil said, “I guess the best place to start would be with what dreamshare’s being used for now that it’s not just in the hands of the US military.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Bob said.

“People are using it to steal secrets,” Neil said. “A whole new branch of crime. Mind crime. People who know how to use a PASIV Device get paid top dollar to break into people’s heads – CEO’s, politicians, the rich and powerful – and take their secrets. The guy I stole my PASIV from was too drunk to make a whole lot of sense, but I gathered that much. And there was a name he dropped. Someone from the original Project Sandman who went rogue and took off, never to be seen again. Last known address was London. I’m hoping I can either get contacts from him for other people in the field, or maybe I can impress him enough that he’ll be my way in to the industry.”

“Our way in,” Bob said. Neil arched an eyebrow, and Bob snorted. “Come on. You think you can show me this and expect me to keep my hands off it? No; we’re in this together. So. Who’re we looking to impress or track down, then?”

“Volkov,” Neil said. “His name’s Volkov.”

“Mm. Russians again.” Bob yawned and turned his head to watch the waves as they slid up the wet sand and receded back into the ocean. “We can handle him.”

Neil’s hand was warm against Bob’s head, and he chuckled as he began rubbing one-handed at the tense muscles at the back of his neck. “Of course we can.”

It struck Bob that he’d yet to mention to Neil that his mother expected to meet Arthur Scalise one day soon. The hypnotic rhythm of the waves, the warmth of the sun, and the comfort of Neil’s hand in his, his thigh beneath his cheek, was too much to fight against just to bring up another potential sticky situation, however, and he let the island and the nearness of his boyfriend work their magic on him, the slowly creeping lassitude drawing him down, slowly, slowly down, until all that remained was the sound of the waves and the gentle pressure of fingers on his neck.

They could handle it.

They could handle anything.

They could –

Bob woke up.

And the whole world had changed in the course of fifteen minutes.


	8. Now, Behind the Blackout Curtains

“And finally, we reach a crucial juncture in your history,” Yusuf said with great satisfaction. He leaned back in his armchair and smiled over the rim of his coffee mug.

“Right,” Ariadne agreed. “Eames’ mental hurdle about sex has –”

“No, no!” Yusuf protested, bolting upright again. Coffee sloshed over the lip of his mug and onto the floorboards. “The PASIV! They’ve begun to explore the possibilities of dreamshare as a team, now. Well, a partnership, but the point is the dream, Ariadne, the PASIV. Arthur revealed the true nature of his con and gained a partner in dreamshare.”

“That was awkward for a while,” Eames said. “The partnership thing. Divided loyalties and all that rubbish.”

“I don’t think I get it,” Ariadne said.

“I was working with Arthur, but I was still running with the Wild Bunch,” Eames said. “And Arthur…”

“I ‘ran with’ me, myself, and I,” Arthur said, picking up where Eames left off. “The guys liked me, but there were a few ruffled feathers, not that anyone said anything, that I showed up and suddenly Eames was doing more with me in two and a half months than he had with his gang since the middle of summer. It probably would’ve been fine if I had just been a boyfriend, because a lot of people get distracted by new relationships, but I was also working a long term job with him. Under any other circumstances, it would have looked a lot like poaching.”

“Where’d the extra month suddenly come from?” Ariadne asked.

“Oh, that’s when it stopped being awkward,” Eames said. He waved it off. “Yusuf’s right. Explore is definitely the word for what we did. After I memorized the manual and studied a few textbooks on the basic principles of architecture.”

“You read a few textbooks and went world-building?” Ariadne asked. “A few textbooks?”

Somehow she managed to make that sound like the most horrifying thing she’d ever heard.

“Yes, and it was splendid,” Eames said brightly. “My God, the things we got up to in our dreams – we did plenty of realistic looking dreams, but when we were just trying to one-up and impress each other, now that was just fun on an entirely new level. Pun most certainly not intended.”

“I think she’s going for ‘aghast’, not ‘awed’,” Arthur said.

“Architects with actual degrees in architecture are so touchy about that sort of thing, aren’t they?” Yusuf commented.

“Technically, I think she’s a semester away from having that degree, but it’s close enough to induce horror, apparently,” Arthur said.

“Almost like nails on a chalkboard, by the looks of it,” Eames chimed in.

“Let me try,” Yusuf said. He carefully set his mug on the coffee table, looked at Ariadne, and gasped, plastering his hands to his cheeks in patently fake shock. “You haven’t read the manual? At all?”

She blushed tomato red as they snickered at her. “You’re all terrible,” she accused them, smiling in spite of her words. “And I didn’t know there was a manual.”

“Damn it, Dom,” Arthur groaned.

“What did your delightful friend do this time, darling?” Eames said.

Arthur gave him a sour look. “Why is he always _my_ friend when he screws up?”

“Many reasons,” Eames said, “First and foremost being that he is, in point of fact, your friend, and not mine. He’s a colleague when I’m forging and a friendly competitor when I’m working as an extractor. You, on the other hand, actually like to spend time with him outside of work. And when he gets you to swear at him, I’m fully prepared to disavow any relationship with him until you’re done being angry with him. Even passing acquaintanceship.”

“So…I was supposed to know about this manual?” Ariadne ventured.

“It’s a rule of mine, an ironclad rule,” Arthur said. He glared into the far shadowy corner of the loft, where Cobb and Saito’s bodies were lying, and strangled his frustration into submission until it came crawling to heel instead of building itself up into a towering fury. It wouldn’t do him any good. Dom was still in Limbo, and they had five more days after this one before the timer ran out on the PASIV. Who was he going to yell at, anyway? Ariadne?

He sighed and turned back to Ariadne. “I have a rule that everyone who works with me knows – and if they want to work with me again, they follow it. Everyone on the team has to know the PASIV inside and out. It’s not just ‘insert IV and press the trigger’. You have to know all its components, how to take it apart for cleaning and put it back together, how to check it over for problems to prevent a foul-up before using it…. It’s a big deal. One glitch along the infusion lines or at the vial cradles or, God help us, in the fucking synchronization monitoring chip, and the whole plan could fall to pieces before it even starts. No Somnacin. Too much Somnacin. The mark waking up before the team. No. Everyone, _everyone_ , knows how the PASIV works on my team, because even if there’s no worst case scenario and the least likely person is the only one available to operate it, at least it’s another set of trained eyes looking at its parts and running through a mental checklist to green light a trip under before hooking in.”

“Entirely reasonable,” Yusuf said. “I may have rarely gone out into the field before this, but no one’s finger goes near the injection activation trigger until I make sure they’re just as familiar with my PASIV as I am.”

“So that’s what it’s called,” Ariadne said. “I’ve been calling it the big glowy button.”

“Call it the trigger, and anyone in the business will know you’re not green as grass,” Eames advised her.

“Oh, God, I was supposed to know all this beforehand?” Ariadne asked. “I’m so sorry, Arthur.” She looked genuinely upset at not living up to what he not-so-privately considered a basic safety standard for any competent extraction team.

“It’s not your fault,” Arthur reassured her. “That’s why I’m mad at Dom. He told me he’d take care of it. In Cobb-speak, that used to mean he’d actually give you a copy of the manual and sit down with you and the PASIV for a show and tell. Now it means, well, whatever the hell happens to be going through his mind at the time. You were right,” he added bitterly. “I knew things weren’t going well with him, but I let him keep putting me off with excuses and evasions – I should have just taken care of it myself. I can’t blame him entirely. If I’d just asked you, at any point, to run through post-use cleanup with me, or even just asked if he’d given you the manual, I’d have known, and you wouldn’t be on a trans-oceanic flight trapped inside a hostile subconscious mind calling the trigger the big glowy button.”

“Pfft. Everyone knows that’s the injection activation trigger,” Ariadne said with a straight face.

Arthur laughed and tossed his arm around her shoulders in a sideways hug, a surge of affection for the youngest member of their team turning him almost recklessly affectionate. “That’s it. That right there just completely salvaged my day. You survived the Dominick Cobb school of on the job training and you came out the other side with your sense of humor intact. I’m declaring that a victory.”

Ariadne sighed contentedly and snuggled into his side before Arthur could remove his arm. “Anything for my favorite point man.”

Letting someone besides Eames into his personal bubble of space was…not unpleasant, Arthur decided. It was almost like the times when he and Wendy got stoned together in their little apartment in the city, when he’d let his guard down and Wendy got cuddly. There was a key difference, though, besides the near decade separating those days and this moment. Right here, with Ariadne, there wasn’t anything dark or ugly lurking in the shadows to taint this new memory. She wasn’t a replacement for his old friend, but maybe – maybe he’d end up with more than a permanent team he could trust at his and Eames’ backs.

“Your point man, huh?” he said, giving her a brief squeeze instead of disentangling himself. “That sounds a lot like a decision.”

“Eames still has to finish your story,” she said. “And don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’m sticking with you and Eames. Why would I want to work with anyone else?”

“An excellent question,” Eames said. “Don’t you agree, Yusuf?”

“Yes, and it’s one I already answered earlier while talking with Arthur,” Yusuf said. “The difficulty lies with long term logistics if I’m going to continue coming along on jobs and into the field with you. My wife is a remarkable woman, but even Malika has limits to her tolerance for being dragged around the world or left behind for long stretches of time.”

“London,” Arthur said, and Eames nodded.

“London what?” Yusuf asked. “London is your next destination? London is where you live? London exists?”

“We can set up an office in London,” Eames said. “It would be easy enough to make it our base of operations. You and your lovely wife can move to the city, as can Ariadne when she finishes her degree. Between my friends and Arthur’s associates in the city, it’ll easily be the safest place to turn into a semi-permanent residence while we’re between jobs.”

“It helps with the image we want to convey to potential clients and business rivals, too,” Arthur said.

“How’s that?” Ariadne asked.

“Only the very best or the very foolish would have the guts to actually set up camp in a major city and hang their shingle out instead of going to ground between jobs,” Eames said.

Ariadne nodded, then lifted her head a few inches so she could look at Arthur. “Are we the best?”

“Ari,” Arthur said seriously, “We are without a doubt the very, very best.”

“That’s good enough for me,” she said, dropping her head back to his shoulder. “Tell me about it. Your adventures in dream architecture back when you were driving without licenses.”

Arthur thought back for a moment. “Do you want to hear about how Eames proposed a contest for building a level based on fairy tales?”

“Otherwise known as the Arthur-can-make-anything-creepy contest,” Eames added. “I went with the old stalwarts, the beanstalk from Jack and the Beanstalk, the gingerbread cottage, Rapunzel’s tower. It was fun and whimsical and quite lovely on that level. Then we switched off and went into Arthur’s head instead.”

“And?” Ariadne asked.

“And it was there that I discovered that Arthur preferred the oldest, most child-unfriendly version of any given fairy tale, and had quite a fondness for incredibly weird folk stories,” Eames said. “The centerpiece of his fairy tale town was Baba Yaga’s hut. That really says it all, I think.”

“It would, if I knew the story,” Ariadne said.

“Immortal evil witch who eats children and lives in a hut that travels around on gigantic chicken legs,” Arthur said succinctly. “I thought it was a pretty cool story when I first read it, back when I was still living in New York.”

“That’s really gross,” Ariadne said. “And yeah, that's totally cool. Did you guys ever use things like that on jobs? Or was this all practice?”

“We learned a very valuable lesson with all that practice together,” Eames said. “Between Arthur’s desire to have every last detail perfect, my rather genius flights of fancy and fondness for psychology, and his tendency toward elegant yet disturbingly aggressive solutions when the need for lateral thinking arose, we found that we made the perfect team. We filled in each other’s gaps, if you will. And because we were the perfect team, once we established ourselves as legitimate players in the industry, if we ever suggested an approach that was out of the box on occasion, well, no one really argued. After all, who argues with results?”

Yusuf leaned forward and looked from Eames to Arthur and back again, his eyes bright with interest. “You can’t mean to say that the job in Moscow five years ago – the Wizard of Oz job – actually happened.”

“If anyone’s ever told you that I forged Toto, don’t listen,” Eames said. “Can’t do animals. Strictly human, thank God.”

“But the rest of the story’s basically true,” Arthur said. "Even the part about the mobsters."

“And yes, the rumor that we did a job off the books for the police is also true, but a third party paid our commission, and our payment from the Met was that they’d pretend we were never there,” Eames said.

“I’m still waiting for another job where I get to convince the mark I’m the devil,” Arthur said. “Even if it was for the cops – and a nasty situation to go into – that one was actually really fun once we worked out the tricky parts.”

“In case you’re wondering, Arthur makes an extremely convincing Lucifer,” Eames added. “No forgery needed. Just add acting.”

“And the right suit for the job,” Arthur said. “I still have it in the closet in Hong Kong.”

“You bought a suit you wore in a dream?” Ariadne asked. “Why?”

“The job just needed one last, personal touch,” Arthur said. He couldn’t help smirking at the memory. “It was worth every penny.”

“You’re teasing again,” Ariadne said. “Both of you. You’re just dangling these hints out there and not saying anything else. Come on, spill.”

“We’ll tell you all about them after we make the transfer from this plane to the one going to Heathrow,” Arthur said. “You’re already being told a different story. Don’t want to get things out of order, right?”

“That’s such a copout,” Ariadne protested. “Please. They sound so great.”

“It’s late, Ari,” Arthur said. “Time for all slightly naughty architects to go to sleep.”

“And what about the rest of you?” she asked.

“Eccentric chemists, wily forgers, and devious point men aren’t exempt,” Arthur said. He gently pushed her upright and onto her feet. “Go to sleep. We’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’ll tell you more tomorrow,” Eames added.

“I’m going, I’m going,” she said, shuffling off slowly in the direction of the beds. “But! Tomorrow had better be a great day for stories.”

“I wouldn’t dream of letting you down,” Eames said.

Yusuf chuckled at Eames’ choice of words and stood as well, taking his mostly empty mug with him. “What does a person dream of when they fall asleep inside another dream? Now there’s a question to pose to a psychologist. They’d fall all over themselves for the chance to find the answer.”

“Jung would have given his right arm to see what the collective unconscious looked like through the lens of shared dreaming,” Eames said with an answering grin. “Sleep well, Yusuf.”

“The same to you, my friend,” he said. “Goodnight, Arthur.”

Arthur had to smile as well. Yusuf’s words were perfectly neutral, but their delivery, and his expression, were so like Archy’s or Tank’s could be at times, that he knew Yusuf had decided to make up Arthur’s mind for him, and he’d collected an older brother whether he wanted one or not. “Night, Yusuf,” he replied. “Pleasant dreams.”

“As long as they’re not of Carl Jung’s severed right arm, I’m sure they will be,” Yusuf said. He gave them a casual salute with his mug and wandered away, laughing quietly to himself.

“You and your found family,” Eames said when it was just the two of them left on the couch. He shook his head with good-natured bemusement. “When he stayed behind, after I took Ariadne downstairs….”

“Let’s just say there aren’t any big surprises left for him,” Arthur said, lowering his voice. “We lucked into a great team with him and Ariadne.”

“That we did,” Eames said, and left it at that, to Arthur’s gratitude. “I was thinking we’d start with Christmas tomorrow.”

“That’s a whole lot of story for so few days,” Arthur said.

“We survived it in one piece; I’m sure the retelling of it won’t be nearly as, ah –”

“Busy?”

“Hectic?”

“Insane?”

“Let’s go with busy,” Eames said. “It won’t be nearly as busy as it was the first time around.”

“That seems to be the way it works,” Arthur agreed. “Hmm.”

“Yes?”

“Which bed are we getting rid of?”

“Yours,” Eames said immediately.

“And sleep on that fluffy pillow-top thing instead of something with actual back support? You have to be kidding.”

“I guess we’ll have to settle this the usual way,” Eames said. He held out his hand and curled it into a loose fist. “Rock paper scissors?”

Arthur extended his hand as well, grinning. “Thumb war?”

Eames gave Arthur’s hand a long look before snorting and dropping his own. “Fuck it,” he said as he searched his pockets. “Let’s just toss a coin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I'm absolutely going to expand on those hinted at jobs that Arthur and Eames talked about. It'll be in a side story, but there's no way I can leave it there!


End file.
